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. (more…)
Archive for the ‘The Button Factory’ Category
Do You Know These People?
Posted in The Button Factory, Venues, tagged Hugh McCabe, Jello Biafra, large format photography, long exposure, the button factory on October 15, 2011 | Leave a 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. (more…)
Surfing and Diving
Posted in The Button Factory, tagged California Uber Alles, Glen E. Friedman, Guantanamo School Of Medicine, Hugh McCabe, Into The Pit, Jello Biafra, large format photography, long exposure, Melvins, the button factory on September 5, 2011 | 3 Comments »
This is four minutes and forty four seconds of Jello Biafra And The Guantanamo School Of Medicine playing in the Button Factory a few weeks ago. I don’t know where to start with this. It’s easily one of the most satisfying results, on all sorts of levels, that I have gotten yet from this project, and it represents something I have been trying to achieve for some time now. (more…)
There Was A Man
Posted in The Button Factory, tagged Gaz Le Rock, Hugh McCabe, large format photography, long exposure, Retarded Cop, the button factory on August 17, 2011 | 1 Comment »
This is Retarded Cop playing in the Button Factory last week. Retarded Cop is the brainchild of the irrepressible Gaz Le Rock, who is also the singer in long-running Dublin punk band, Moutpiece. After years of living it large, Gaz recently cleaned up his act and threw himself into writing, recording and releasing songs, under the name Retarded Cop. Usually accompanied by hilarious home-made videos, these songs appeared with alarming frequency, a non-stop barrage of pop punk classics such as Tea’N'Fags, Copvan and Charlie Sheen. The great thing about Gaz’s songs is that he is clearly writing about his life, but it’s done in a humorous and self-deprecating way that leaves plenty of room for (mis)interpretation. I don’t know if he really had sex in the jacks at Popicalia, but who cares when it makes such a great line for the chorus of that song? (more…)
Dan Deacon in The Button Factory
Posted in The Button Factory, tagged Dan Deacon, dance off, Hugh McCabe, large format photography, long exposure, patrick kelleher, the button factory on August 10, 2011 | Leave a Comment »
Anyone who has been to a Dan Deacon gig will have a rough idea of what is going on in this photograph but anyone else might require some explanation. Dan Deacon is an electronic musician and composer from Baltimore who is well known for his unique live shows (that’s Baltimore in the US by the way, not the Baltimore on the south coast of Ireland that was sacked by Algerian pirates in 1631). Typically he sets up his equipment on the floor and then orchestrates various forms of audience participation throughout the gig. A common one is the human tunnel, which starts with a pair of punters holding hands above their heads and forming an arch. Two more audience members go under the arch and links hands on the other side. Two more go through, extending the tunnel further, and so on and so on. Sometimes the tunnel goes right out the door of the venue, down the street and then back in again. Does that make sense? No? Then look at the video below which shows it happening the last time he played Dublin. (more…)
Photography And The Search For Lost Time
Posted in Photography Theory, The Button Factory, tagged Hiroshi Sugimoto, Hugh McCabe, Idris Khan, Jim Campbell, large format photography, long exposure, Rodrigo Orrantia, Roland Barthes, Song Exposure, the button factory on July 25, 2011 | 2 Comments »
The PhotoIreland festival is in full swing right now and I am running around trying to catch as much of it as I can. I went to a talk last week by a curator from London called Rodrigo Orrantia entitled “Photography And The Search For Lost Time”. In spite of the fact that there were only about 5 people there, it was really good, and Orrantia was an enthusiastic and interesting presenter. He was talking about photographic artists that address issues to do with time in their work and stretch the temporal boundaries of what might usually be considered normal photography. (more…)
Meat Puppets
Posted in The Button Factory, Venues, tagged Hugh McCabe, large format photography, long exposure, Meat Puppets, Our Band Could Be Your Life, the button factory on June 11, 2011 | Leave a Comment »
I have moaned at length on this blog on more than one occasion about the problems I have with stage lights at gigs; specifically ones that are pointing out at the crowd, and hence right into my camera. These things play havok with long exposures and I’ve missed out on getting photographs of many bands over the last year because of this. I had thought of talking to the lighting engineers about it, to try and get them to tone it down, but I was reluctant to do so mostly because I don’t like the idea of trying to tell them how they should be doing their jobs. I also felt that doing this might change the nature of these pictures in a subtle but still significant way – I wouldn’t be simply capturing what happens anymore, I would be to some extent directly influencing what happens, and therefore veering somewhat into the realms of constructed photographs. (more…)
It’s Not All Bad
Posted in The Button Factory, tagged Black Lips, Harmonic, Hugh McCabe, large format photography, long exposure, Squarehead, the button factory on May 27, 2011 | Leave a Comment »
The last couple of months have seen a whole host of much-loved institutions around Dublin close down due to lack of money, lack of business, unreasonably high rents, and all the other difficulties that the recession has brought – music outlets (Road Records, Comet, City Discs), restaurants (Gruel, The Mermaid Cafe), bookshops (Waterstones), and most depressingly of all, the best cinema in the city (The Lighthouse). Up until a week or so ago, it looked like The Button Factory was about to join that grim list too as it had entered a period of examinership at the start of the year. As I understand it, this meant that they were under the financial microscope and unless they could prove that there was still a viable business there, the plug would be pulled. (more…)
You Sir, Have The Eye …
Posted in Photography Writings, The Button Factory, Uncategorized, Venues, tagged john szarkowski, large format photography, long exposure, silver mt zion, stages, the button factory, the photographer's eye, u:mack productions on December 23, 2010 | 4 Comments »
Commenting on this post recently, my buddy Dubh David Black said “You sir, have the eye!”. It’s always nice to get compliments like this but it got me thinking about what this actually means. The more I thought about it, the more I realised that it said something interesting about this series of photographs, though maybe not in the way Dubh intended. (more…)
Road Records Night
Posted in The Button Factory, Venues, tagged large format photography, long exposure, Road Records, stages, the button factory, The Redneck Manifesto, u:mack productions on September 19, 2010 | 1 Comment »
This is The Redneck Manifesto playing at the Road Records farewell gig on September 10th. It was a fantastic night, and a fitting send-off for Dublin’s greatest ever record shop. Road was far more than just a shop, it quickly became the hub of a whole community of music fans and musicians. (more…)
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