On the Saturday night of ATP, while watching the fantastic Bitch Magnet in the Reds venue, I noticed a small wedge-shaped area on the right of the stage that wasn’t being used for anything. I started thinking about how good it would be to be taking photographs with the camera actually on the stage as opposed to from the audience’s point of view. I made some enquiries the next morning, and again thanks to some incredibly helpful folk who work at ATP, I found myself later that day setting up the 4×5 on the stage just as The Ex were getting ready to play. Continue Reading »
Posted in ATP | Tagged All Tomorrow's Parties, Getatchew Mekuria, Hugh McCabe, large format photography, long exposure, Nightmare Before Christmas, The Ex | Leave a Comment »
This is Les Savy Fav playing on the first day of ATP Nightmare Before Xmas in December 2011. They played twice, kicking things off in the smaller Reds venue late afternoon, and then closing the night on the main stage at 1 in the morning or so. This photo was from the earlier set and is, I think, an exposure of about 4 minutes, taken during whatever song in which singer Tim Harrington was playing a keyboard for. Continue Reading »
Posted in ATP | Tagged ATP, Hugh McCabe, large format photography, Les Savy Fav, long exposure, Nightmare Before Christmas | 3 Comments »
Last month I got to do something pretty exciting. I’ve been going to the All Tomorrow’s Parties (ATP) festivals in the UK on and off for years now. For those of you who are unfamiliar this is the basic deal. ATP take over the Butlins holiday camp at Minehead, near Bristol, for a weekend (they used to run them in the less salubrious Camber Sands). They invite someone (usually a musician, a band) to ‘curate’ a music festival there for the weekend. They then invite all sorts of other artists who they like, were influenced by, or regularly go drinking with, to come and play also. As a punter, you stay in one of the chalets on site, which beats the hell out of some smelly tent, though invariably the chalet ends up just as smelly as a tent by the end of the weekend – but at least you’re dry. Continue Reading »
Posted in ATP | Tagged All Tomorrow's Parties, ATP, Battles, Hugh McCabe, large format photography, long exposure, Nightmare Before Christmas | Leave a Comment »
December 20, 2011 by Hugh
This is not the usual fare. A few weeks ago I was invited to come and take photos at the third Black Metal Theory Symposium, which I wrote about before here, and which took place in the The Pint Bar in Dublin. There were supposed to be some bands playing after the talks but these cancelled a few days beforehand. The organizers suggested I come along anyway and do long exposure photographs of the speakers. The one above is Nicola Masciandaro delivering his paper entitled On The Mystical Love Of Black Metal. I wasn’t timing the presentations but Nicola spoke for well over 20 minutes, so the above shot is a long exposure indeed. Continue Reading »
Posted in Uncategorized | Tagged Black Metal Theory Symposium, Franko B, Hugh McCabe, Karin Selberg, large format photography, long exposure, Mayhem, Nicola Masciandaro | Leave a Comment »
Here’s another quick one. This is the mighty Pinback from San Diego playing in The Button Factory last week – a great band who are not as well known on this side of the Atlantic as they deserve to be. This is an exposure of 4 minutes 51 seconds and is the first song they played. I can’t remember what song it was and forgot to write it down. The gig was an absolute joy, sometimes you can’t beat a bunch of guys who know what they’re doing just playing their songs really really well. Good times all round. Continue Reading »
Posted in The Button Factory, Venues | Tagged Dark Star, Hiroshi Sugimoto, Hugh McCabe, large format photography, long exposure, Pinback, the button factory | Leave a Comment »
November 27, 2011 by Hugh
No time to actually write something about this so I’m just going to throw the photograph up here. This was taken at a Fringe Festival production, When Irish Hearts Are Praying, written by Aoife Crehan. I took photographs at the dress rehearsal for the show, which clearly is the way to go with theatre in future. This is a photograph of one of the acts of the play, and it is an exposure of about 10 minutes or so. I am really interested in doing more theatre stuff in the future, so anyone reading this with good contacts for me …. hook me up!
Posted in Theatre | Tagged Absolut Fringe, Hugh McCabe, large format photography, long exposure, When Irish Hearts Are Praying | Leave a Comment »
November 13, 2011 by Hugh
Next weekend a very strange event is taking place in Dublin. The world’s third Black Metal Theory Symposium will happen in the Pint Bar on Eden Quay, during the afternoon of Sunday 20th of November. There is going to be a series of talks with titles like On the Mystical Love of Black Metal, Folding a Cadaverous Scream: The Disharmonious Flesh of Recombinant Horror, and “The Hopeless Soul Keeps Mating”: Notes on Black Metal and Contemporary Fiction. Scanning through the abstracts you will find references to thinkers like Deleuze, Kant and Bataille, and to concepts like speculative realism, queer theology, and medieval mystical discourse. After this series of talks, which include breaks for “refreshments”, there will be performances from Eternal Helcaraxe and Wound Upon Wound. Seriously, I can’t think of a better way of spending a Sunday afternoon and evening. Continue Reading »
Posted in Whelans | Tagged Black Metal, Black Metal Theory Symposium, Hugh McCabe, large format photography, long exposure, whelans, Wolves In The Throne Room | 1 Comment »
The other day I was reading Maurice Merleau-Ponty’s 1961 essay on phenomenology, Eye And Mind (I’ve recently started doing an MA in Art In The Contemporary World at NCAD so you can probably expect more of this kind of thing in the future – those of you who just want to know who the band is are free to skip right to the end). There’s a section in it where he talks about the representation of time and movement within both painting and photography. He argues that artists such as Cezanne and Matisse provide more faithful renditions of our actual perceptual experience of being in the world than those provided by objective scientific accounts and the Cartesian perspective-based art inspired by them. At one point, he discusses photography, and argues that it also falls short of capturing our real experience of the world because it cannot capture movement in the way that a painter can, shackled as it is to capturing frozen, instantaneous snapshots. Painting, on the other hand …. Continue Reading »
Posted in Photography Theory, Whelans | Tagged Andreas Feininger, Eye And Mind, Hugh McCabe, large format photography, long exposure, Merleau-Ponty, ncad, Petah Coyne, phenomenology, Rodin, whelans | 1 Comment »
I don’t normally post up more than one photo from a gig. Sometimes I don’t even have more than one photo from a gig. This long exposure photography business can be a hit and miss. I normally wouldn’t take more than 8 and a whole bunch of these might just not come out for various reasons. Even if I have a few, there are usually very similar, as they are all shot from the same spot, the only variation being the length of the exposure. So, I tend to pick one of them and then that becomes the picture of the night. However, in the case of the Jello Biafra gig that I have already posted about here, I can’t resist releasing a few more of them into the wild. This is partly because I like them so much, but also because there’s a lot of variation from one shot to the next, and all of them have something interesting going on. Continue Reading »
Posted in The Button Factory, Venues | Tagged Hugh McCabe, Jello Biafra, large format photography, long exposure, the button factory | Leave a Comment »
This picture is a 10 minute exposure taken at a show called Globe in the Liberty Hall Theatre a few weeks ago. I had never been there before although many people had told me about it, and I had always been curious about the place. It turns out that it’s a superb 400-seater theatre housed in a building just adjacent to Liberty Hall itself. Liberty Hall is of course the home of Ireland’s largest trade union, SIPTU, and the theatre itself is owned and ran by SIPTU also. Continue Reading »
Posted in Liberty Hall Theatre | Tagged Artur Sikora, Globe, Hugh McCabe, large format photography, Liberty Hall, Liberty Hall Theatre, long exposure, Paddy Cahill, SIPTU, Trade Unions | Leave a Comment »
Older Posts »
