Traces Of The Real

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.

You have to look closely at the one above to see it (clicking on the image will give you a larger version). Right in the centre, up near the front of the audience, there are two people standing there who are rendered quite sharply within the image. There is a blur of bodies all around them but you can see them clearly, grinning away, while they take a photograph of themselves, probably on a mobile phone. What’s obviously happened here is that the flash from their photo has caught them and frozen them onto my film.

I love this. We’ve all seen this scene a million times over but usually it’s a case of “here we are, standing on the Halfpenny bridge” or “here we are, at Jimmy’s birthday bash”. In this case it’s “here we are, at a deafening punk rock gig, just seconds before Jello Biafra of the Dead Kennedys crowd-surfed over our heads”. Dublin’s a small place so more than likely someone reading this will recognize who they are.  If so, please let them know, or put me in contact with them, as I’d like to them to see this. It would also be really interesting to see the picture that they took.