January 2011

Another month of Buddy Guy shows is in the books. 16 shows in 27 days, each show over 2 hours long. I was talking to Buddy before the first show and he was telling me that based on the fact that the economy was so bad this year, and to reward his fans for selling out all 16 shows, he was going to play a minimum of two hours a night to reward them. Imagine that- a 74 year old man, in 2011, when 25 years olds are playing for 90 minutes and complaining that it is too difficult, wants to play more.

Another big story this weekend was the emergence of Quinn Sullivan. Quinn’s father took him to see Buddy play in their hometown outside of Boston when Quinn was 7 years old. Having started playing guitar at the age of five, he had already learned every Beatles song note for note, and was moving on to the blues. Buddy invited him to the stage that night, and he blew the crowd away. His father videotaped the event and posted it on uTube- over 2 million hits to date. This was followed buy many performances with Buddy, appearances on the Ellen DeGeneres and Oprah shows and many appearances with Buddy, including a few years ago when Buddy, Quinn and Mavis Staples jammed in front of 50,000 people at Taste of Chicago.

Moving forward to this past weekend, Quinn, at the ripe old age of 12 has released his first CD (Cyclone) and opened for Buddy on his closing show of the month. He is not to be missed! Check him out at www.quinnsullivan.me

For the last few months I have been immersed in one of the strangest projects in my lifetime. I have come in contact with two guys who have acquired a large quantity of negatives originally belonging to a reclusive photographer , who worked primarily in the 50’s through the 70’s in Chicago, New York and various parts of Europe. Her name is Vivian Maier, and in the last few months she has become one of the most famous photographers in America (YIKES!! The power of the press).

This is worth checking out. There are two sites up with her work and story (and links to all the press)

http://www.vivianmaierphotography.com/

http://vivianmaier.blogspot.com/

I have had people over to my house every day for the last two months proofing negatives, scanning, spotting, and in general creating an amazing story that will hopefully make Vivian Maier known throughout the world as on of the greatest street photojournalists of the 20^th century.

It is tremendously satisfying to be a part of this, and meet all the cool people involved in the project- and especially to see people band together- not for money, but for the love of art and the chance to tell a story about a great unknown artist.

If anyone reading this is in Chicago anytime between now and March, there is an exhibit of her work hanging at the Chicago Cultural Center on Michigan and Randolph in downtown Chicago.

Just read that the four major record companies in Canada had to pay 45 million dollars to settle a class action suit brought because at one point they just decided not to pay the artists that they were licensing songs from. The actual figure was around 6 billion dollars, but the settled! Meanwhile they are suing kids in dorms for illegally downloading songs from the internet. I guess we photographers are not the only ones being screwed!! Read here.

Meanwhile, in an article in the recent DigitalPhotoPro, a 2008 Bureau of labor statistics survey was quoted:

There are 152,000 professionally employed photographers in the US. The median annual wage of salaried photographers was about $30,000 per year, with the middle 50% earning between $20,000 and $45,000 per year. WOW. Maybe we should form record companies and start stealing from our artists..

At the same time equipment is getting more expensive, and has to be upgraded more often, and the average price we are getting for our work is dropping daily. It almost doesn’t seem worth staying in the business!

A couple of days ago someone sent me an email that was sent out to contributors of a major photo agency. I am printing it here but deleting the name of the agency to protect the innocent!! It concerns the agency wanting to put up a best of page on their website and not being able to find enough images good enough to be considered “best of.”

“Apologies but after trawling through the files and getting together a selection of images for this —— is not happy with many of them and so the banner will not be going up yet. I will work on this some more and hopefully get it up there in the next week or so.

I have to say that this has alerted —– (director of editorial photography) to the standard of photography that we are putting in to (another agency) and he is not impressed. His words were ‘I do not want to see another microphone in front of mouth picture uploaded and edits must be cut down. Do the photographers really think about the framing of their pictures before uploading the shots? To me they are all looking very boring.’

I have really struggled to even get 30 finest images out of all of our pictures. —– will be keeping an eye on our submissions and has asked me to drop photographers who are not up to standard and to hire new ones. I’m really sorry to all but it’s going to be a tough slog to prove yourselves from now on if you want to continue to shoot live.”

Wow!! Maybe there is hope. I just photographed two Weezer shows this weekend and uploaded 16 images to Getty. I also photographed 3 Buddy Guy shows in the last three days and I have uploaded 14 images total from those. There were a lot of photographers shooting the first three songs of Weezer each night. I wonder how many images they sent to their agencies?

In 1988, my friend Francis at Chrysalis Records asked me to travel to Detroit to photograph one of her new bands. It was a half Jewish, half black soul funk band called Was Not Was. I met them in Greektown and shot a bunch of pictures. When I got home, a CD was waiting for me in the mailbox. WOW!! Some of the best stuff I had heard in years. I still, to this day think they were one of the greatest bands I had ever heard, both recorded and live. Over the years, I spent a lot of time with the band, starting with a shoot at the old Tigers Stadium in downtown Detroit for a travel piece for Rolling Stone. Over the next few years I went to several events, including a record release party in downtown Los Angeles, featuring guest stars Elton John and Iggy Pop, and a rehearsal for Farm Aid 4 with John, Hiatt, Iggy Pop and Bonnie Raitt, all of whom the band backed up the next day at the concert. Meanwhile, Don Was became one of the most famous producers on the planet (Rolling Stones, Bonnie Raitt, Elton John, Iggy Pop, etc.). The band went on the back burner as Don became a producer full time, and David started doing music for the “X Files”. The band still plays occasionally, and they are as good as ever.

Last month, Don did a blog for the Detroit Metro Times concerning the idea that when people download songs from the iTunes they are missing finding out many of the things that can only be found in liner notes.

Says Don:

Since I started making records 30-some years ago, we’ve always made a point of mentioning the recording, mixing and mastering engineers along with the musicians, arrangers, songwriters and producers who contribute to the records. When those credits were printed on a 12-inch album jacket, the letters were large enough to actually read. Fans got a real sense of both the collaborative nature of recorded music and of all the work and dedication behind every album. Subsequently, smaller CD booklets necessitated an almost illegible print size. These days, the nation’s largest retailer of music – the iTunes store – has essentially eliminated credits, liner notes and printed lyrics from their digital packaging.  I’m at a loss to explain Apple’s ambivalence about upholding the quality and value of the product that has fueled the success of their hardware. For those of us who grew up in Detroit, this kind of corporate cockiness should have a certain ring of familiarity: It’s an early symptom of  the same shortsightedness that brought down the Big Three automakers and sent the city into an economic tailspin.

This reminds me of the day I received a copy of the first album I ever shot a cover for- a record by a local band called Pezband. Holding that piece of cardboard in my hands was one of the proudest moments of my young career- it was a substantial depiction of my work. A 12 inch square allowed creativity by a whole team of people- photographer, art director, designer- to make a lasting impression (and great sales tool) for the band. All of this was diminished when CD’s took over the market, and the need for an album cover hardly exists at all in the digital age.

I still have about 3000 vinyl discs in their great artistic sleeves, and when I look at them it leaves me longing for those days when creativity ruled. Also. If you had a double fold out cover, it was still the best utensil to clean pot with!!