When you’ve been shooting a band for 20 years, what do you do with the archive you’ve created?
I’ve been shooting Boston’s Buffalo Tom since the 2000s. The alt-rock trio spent nearly a decade on hiatus after releasing a string of albums in the 1980s and 90s, and when they returned with their album ‘Three Easy Pieces‘ in 2007, I realised I wanted to document this second stage of their career, no longer on rotation on MTV but still packing out concert halls and music venues on short tours around Europe.
I decided to do it all on black-and-white film, pushed to high ISOs – sometimes as high as 6400.
When I started shooting them, digital had recently conquered photography. You didn’t see many people shooting film, and even fewer of them in the pit at rock shows. Black-and-white film might have seemed an odd choice.
I shot shows in London and Amsterdam, Brussels and Boston, Berlin and Madrid, on tours through the 2000s and 2010s and 2020s, through another three new albums and anniversary tours harking back to their big albums of the early 1990s.
Geopolitics got in the way of my original plans – a book, perhaps in time for the band’s 40th anniversary this year. Books are wonderful tactile, physical objects that are a giant pain in the arse to post around the world – and that’s before Brexit and US tariffs came to the party, and made it even more painful
But something else popped into my head in the summer, not long after the band announced an autumn European tour which starts next week: postcards of shots from the archive, collected into a specially designed box.
I’ve done collector’s boxes before for Kosmo Foto film, but not for postcards – and the more I thought about it, the more it seemed like a good idea. Postcard boxes are a lot easier to produce and to bring to shows than books – and cheaper for the fans, too.
So, this is the first of them – ‘Live Frames 2007-2011’, with 17 images taken from the band’s 2007 and 2011 tours across Europe, including the picture of drummer Tom Maginnis that would eventually make the cover of the band’s 2011 album ‘Skins’. All of them were shot on pushed black-and-white film, either Fuji Neopan or Kodak Tri-X. I chopped and changed film stocks until Fujifilm made the decision for me by axing Neopan in the 2010s. Since then, I’ve pretty much exclusively kept to Tri-X.
The postcards were produced from scans of prints made from the original negatives – one of the staff at Bayeux, the London professional lab I use for projects like this, suggested the technique to achieve a different look. There are traces of the edge of the print on some of the postcards – an echo of the physical process these images went through.
The boxes will be sold at Buffalo Tom’s shows in Belfast, Edinburgh, Manchester and London this week, followed by their European dates in Belgium, the Netherlands and Germany. What’s left will appear on the Kosmo Foto Shop later in October, probably just for UK fans. If there’s enough interest, I’ll produce more boxes that will be available to US customers in 2027.
I’ll also be selling 12×10 prints of most of the images in the set in strictly limited editions of only 35 prints, direct from the Kosmo Foto Shop; these will be on sale from mid-November and will be available to Buffalo Tom fans across the world.
I shot this project on all sorts of cameras, including a Voigtlander Bessaflex TM and Bessa R until I saw sense and kept it to a couple of Nikon cameras and two lenses. That’s been what I’ve stuck with since 2011, apart from shooting one show on my trusty Pentax ES IIs (if they were good enough for Pennie Smith to shoot The Clash on, they’re good enough for me.) When you have as many cameras as I do, sometimes it’s nice to have these restrictions – and shooting on the same cameras, lenses and film gives the project a cohesive feel, year after year.
Concertsin the 21st Century may lost mystique of decades before – everyone has a camera on them, and the performances are recorded and snapped from myriad angles. But with access like this, there’s angles and positions that gig-goers can’t get to – backstage and side of stage, with the audience in view.
One of my favourite images is the one below, taken during the first show I shot in 2007. Inbetween songs I managed to crawl behind a stage monitor, hidden from the view of the crowd as the band rattled through the set, catching a sweat-drenched Bill Janovitz roaring at the mic.
I'm a New Zealander who has been living in London since the mid-1990s, shooting film seriously since the year 2000. Kosmo Foto was launched in 2012 and has since become a film brand, with the release of my first films Kosmo Foto Mono 35mm (2017) and Kosmo Foto Mono 120 (2019).
I’m doing everything I can to promote film photography in the 21st Century, and help it survive and thrive. If you want to write something for Kosmo Foto, please drop me a line at foto.dowling@gmail.com.
