Negatives!!
What started as a story about a book led to me going on about something else entirely.
Our dear old friend Amy Fleischer just put out a pretty great photo book covering the era of emo music we dearly loved. My image of Casey from Hot Rod Circuit even made the cover! I shot that image in 2002 at The Wiltern theater in Los Angeles and it’s an important one for me even though it’s one of maybe 5 shots I took of the band that night. I was there for the promise of some free Miller High Life backstage and on the way backstage I looked up and saw Casey shredding and snapped a couple pics real quick (the first one being completely blurry). It’s funny how things work sometimes. The photo that I easily could not have taken opened the door to years of working with Converse and those Converse shoots led to years of other shooting ad campaigns for other brands like Levi’s, Frye Boots, Sony and even a full Time’s Square takeover of our images for Pepsi.
Converse reached out to license that image for their stores because their image at the time was pretty rock and roll and this is photo is pretty damn rock and roll. They saw more of our work because of that and hired us to “shoot their models like we shoot our friends”. And that was it, just like that we were now advertising photographers. Since we had no experience shooting advertising or our new version of it, we faked it. Neither of us ever assisted other photographers so we didn’t really know what being on a set was like, or that we were allowed to actually go on the motorhome (that was there for us), or how to direct talent since we were always just documenting what was in front of us. So we faked it, we went into it like we would anything else. We were cool with everyone and just photographed everything like we we were just hanging out with our friends. I guess we still do that.
There is of course much more to this story but basically we documented our friends and our friends just happened to be doing some really cool shit. Brands wanted that image as their own so they hired us to make more friends but these new friends were using or wearing these new products. And that’s how you become an advertising photographer!
Back to the book, it’s pretty great and I have some photos in there from my very early days of taking pictures. Back when everything we did was 100% in pursuit of nothing but fun and had cameras with us always. Photos of Saves the Day when the band hired me to hang out and document the recording of Stay What You Are a month after I moved to Los Angeles that became the album artwork. That was my first decent paycheck for taking pictures. Photos of Piebald who we became very close with after they hired me (my second ever photo gig) to shoot all the album artwork of “We are the Only Friends We Have”. They all moved to LA shortly after we did and we’d spend every day they weren’t touring playing Risk and Monkeyball at their house in Silver Lake. I knew I would miss them when they toured so I decided to just just jump in the van and sell merch! So many photos from that era. Also photos of Jimmy Eat World that I talk about in the book and some of My Chemical Romance that I really don’t have any deep connection to since I was just hired by Myspace to show up and shoot them. I did however bring our make-up artist’s son Dakota with me to assist even though he was only 12 because he was the biggest fan at the time. Sadly, I was probably a little jaded on the genre by the time I took those images even though I can appreciate the music now.
Wow, I just rambled on for awhile there.
We made a limited run of prints that we are trying to sell for a reasonable price so people can purchase some art and maybe a little piece of the emo scene’s history. A portion of the proceeds are getting donated to a good cause because ‘tis the season right?
Also, I love chatting about all this stuff and have stories for days and I hope it wasn’t too annoying reading me ramble.
Much love,
Jeremy
Shut up and Take me to the PRINTS!
https://www.day19.fun/printshop
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PPS. Share your stories of this era, or any era really. What were your favorite records of the time?!