There was work done mainly with 3 photographers: Michelle Klein-Hass, Valerie Papa and M. Segal. The work of each one has a completely different character. I frustrated all of them because despite how genuinely good the shoots were, each time something wasn't quite right. Either nothing quite represented the whole piece (a tall order considering how many ideas there are running through it) or there were technical problems. But taken together, the shoots came very close to representing what it was all about. It wasn't until I was able to do the cassette covers and use a combination of photos and artwork that I felt I really approached what I wanted.
This is one of the best from the sessions with Michelle. (A hard choice to pick just one for this page!) There's a train motif running through the album and we tried to capture some of that in this shot.
This is a Caligari-like shot from the session with Valerie. The whole shoot has a different feel from the others; we were going for something more dreamlike, to tie in with that angle of the piece. Ultimately we succeeded too well; there were no shots that somehow showed both extremes of grim reality and dream fantasy. How could that be done? I wasn't sure.
M. truly succeeded in capturing one of the subtle yet main ideas of the piece: the feeling of being trapped in the modern world, of being worn down and pushed to the edge of it; shown here as the quiet melancholy of an early morning off, trying in vain to find a way out before the bottom drops out and the darkness carries you away....
The only real problem with this shoot was a technical one. Something was wrong with the camera and there are long, deep scratches in the negatives, which show up as thin black lines running the length of each picture. M. was heartbroken and I wasn't too happy either. Both of us had been really excited about the shoot, feeling it had gone well. One look at the pictures confirms that. But you have to look around the scratches.
Eventually I hope to post the majority of the pictures from these shoots to another site. This is in the works right now, so stay posted for further developments.
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