This past August I took some photographs for the cover of the
Denver Magazine.
Sorry about the copyright watermark, but lately people have been taking my images without asking.
My friend Auna who wrote the article also asked me some questions for the article.
1. Have you been taking photos your whole life?
Mrs. Conti, the Johnsburg Central music teacher, gave me my first semi-professional photography gig way back in the 8th grade. The junior and senior choirs were performing a fall program about the seasons and they needed a slide show to accompany the evening. Somehow I must have convinced her to let me take some photos of the Hudson River, which ran through our backyard, turning leaves, and dew frosted early morning fields. About three months ago, while moving apartments, I came across a few of those slides in the bottom of a box. Let’s just say that I don’t actively list my first photography job on my resume.
2. Did you ever imagine you'd be here, making a book and being the photographer of this legendary band?
I always imagined myself as a Lego designer or President. When I joined the band in March of 2006 it was just for a three-week tour as the merch guy. At the time I was waiting to hear if I’d been accepted into graduate school and had three weeks to kill. I took my video camera out on the road on a whim. It’s still a little surreal to think that I’ve had a music video on VH1’s Top 20 Countdown (2007 The Fray “All At Once), a short film that over 100,000 people bought (2006 The Fray: the Place That I’m From, The Place That I’m In), another film on the way, and I’m about to be published. I was just the t-shirt guy!
3. Tell us a bit about your background? You went to Colgate and grew up in New York? What did you study?
Colgate University to me right now seems like nothing more than a pile of student loan debt. Seeing as this will be my first official chance to list my academic achievements on any sort of resume or official questionnaire, I’d like the record to note that I did indeed graduate Cum Laude with a degree in French Literature. Its odd to think that I’ve never had to actually use my college degree in any capacity thus far in life. After I graduated I drove west, literally in an attempt to get as far away from home as possible, and almost ended up in Denver, in a design internship at the Denver Center Theatre Company. While I was in school I worked under a wonderful stage designer, Marjorie Kellogg, and eventually had a set realized for a production of Arthur Miller’s All My Sons. This set and my design secured me a spot in the Denver Center and so one day in early September I drove through Denver to check out the city and the Company but ended up continuing on to California.
4. Did you listen to the music before you began working with the band?
I’d never heard of the Fray before I joined them on the road. I seem to remember checking them out on their Myspace page, trying to decide who played what instrument based off of attitudes and looks in their promotional photograph.
5. What is the most interesting photograph you've taken of the band? Is there a particular image you're proud of?
The coolest photograph I’ve taken of the band didn’t make the book. We decided to leave out a lot of the random artist and musician encounters that happened on the road and this included a photograph with Bruce Springsteen backstage at Madison Square Garden. The photo is awful really, a bad flash, and the focus is a little off but it’s The Boss so none of that really matters. I only had a few seconds to snap a candid of him with the band but I’ll never forget how good he smelled or how the entire room was attracted to him. I’m perhaps most proud of an image from the red carpet at the 2006 Billboard Music Awards. I managed to sneak onto the red carpet with the band and as they walked pass a mile of flash bulbs I stood behind them and took a photo of their silhouettes as the press snapped photos in front of me. The perspective of that photograph should give everyone the idea of what it feels like to have your life on display.
6. Tell us some crazy fan stories? Has anyone done anything outrageous to get in touch with the band?
Dan Lavery, who plays bass with the Fray on the road, is also in the band Tonic. His band always called the super obsessed fans, CTs, as in Creepy Travelers. For some reason the Fray seems to attract CTs who also happen to be bakers. There was this one girl who worked for an arline, Crazy Katie Cookie Girl. She was always showing up in some random with tins of baked goods. There also seems to be a west coast contingent of young bakers who like to leave little plastic bags of cookies at shows, each with a name attached. At first they would only make bags of cookies for the band but at the last Red Rocks show of the 2007 summer tour seven bags of cookies ended up on the piano during the Cable Car party time, and sure enough there was one for the monitor engineer, Brian, the tour manager’s assistant, Steve, and myself. I swear I’ve seen these bags of cookies in Portland, Seattle and in Denver.
8. What has been your favorite/most memorable location?
It’ll be hard to soon forget England and Europe in the fall or the two week tour that took us to ten different countries, in fourteen days. But some of my most vivid memories come from days off on tour; a day spent in an Olympic size swimming pool with diving platforms in suburban St. Louis, sneaking into Royal Albert Hall in London to watch Modest Mouse from box seats, water skiing on some lake somewhere outside of Austin, TX, and standing on the grass at Wrigely Field.
9. Which band member entertains the others? Who gets picked on the most?
Ben’s the entertainer. Hands down. On a long drive from Savannah to Houston Ben decided that he was going to tune the TV to TCM, turn down the volume, and do his own voices for all the characters on the screen. At three in the morning, over a six pack or more, this can be a really fun game.
10. Who are some of the other people that travel with you guys?
For my first three tours there were just four of us out there, Mark Maher, our fearless tour manager and the best air band mulitinstrumentalist you’ll ever meet, Steve Clark, the original guitar tech and only person I’ve ever seen eat two Chipolte burritos in one sitting, and Brian Joseph, gentle monitor engineer and underground Denver celebrity. One of the best decisions that management has ever made, at least in my humble opinion, was providing us with two way walkie talkies. Walkie talkies will always be cool, I don’t care how old you are. So of course we had to have nicknames. Brian and Steve chose their own, Serpico and Viper. Mark became Papa Bear and somehow I ended up Tubbs because of all the merchandise tubs I kept my cotton in. At the end of 2007 our truck and bus company had grown from one bus and four crew members to three buses, four tractor trailers, and twenty-three crew members. Two of the best additions to the touring crew would be Denver’s own Jeff Linsenmaier and Joel Wojcik.
11. What has been the most interesting thing you've learned about yourself while traveling on the road?
The road is both the loneliest and most exciting place you’ll ever be. Three weeks out you begin to lose track of those things in your life that don’t seem present anymore. You forget to call people back home, you forget to pay your bills, you start living moment to moment; its almost as if you’re some modern day tramp or vagabond out there devouring new cities and new experiences at a rapid fire rate. But this take on life can become tiring, exhausting, haunting, and sad. In the past three years I’ve managed to visit all forty eight contiguous states, and spend the night in every one except for South Dakota and there is certainly no way that this experience of seeing my country could have ever happened any other way, nor would it have felt right if I wasn’t out there on this adventure with a group of friends. It takes a certain breed of individual with a certain commitment to this transient lifestyle to keep touring year after year after year and while I’ll never fall into that category the allure of the road will always be there. Touring has made me realize that before I put some roots down somewhere there’s still a lot of country left to see and that I’ll always have the urge to head back out there and disappear.
12. Do you ever wear your Fray shirt?
This must be the ultimate party foul, like they say in PCU, “don’t be that guy”. I do have more than a few Fray t-shirts but my Fray Dickies rain slicker takes the cake as the coolest piece of Fray gear I own. I wore it to a going away party for Ben a few weeks back and got called out for it.
13. Tell us about some of your other projects?
The odd part about talking about photography is that I’m a film director first and foremost. The photography work with the Fray actually stemmed from my documentary film work with the band. I didn’t actually start taking photographs until my fifth or sixth tour in. Currently I’m in post-production on a feature length film about the band recording their second record over the course of the first seven months of 2008. This film will be released with the next record. Outside of the Fray, I just directed two music videos for Eric Bachmann of Crooked Fingers, shot a music video for the band Valencia, and shot a short film with the band Jack’s Mannequin. Next up, two short film projects.
14. What has been your experience with your book coming out this month? Has it been a difficult project?
Work on the coffee table book began in early January, which seems so long ago. The process of narrowing down 16,980 photographs to 100 is tedious to say the least so its actually quite hard to gain some perspective yet on the situation because I’m still not far removed from the sheer amount of work that went into selecting and producing these few images. To say I’m thrilled would be understatement. Given the opportunity to pick a publisher and pitch the concept we chose a small boutique company in Seattle, Marquand Books, on the strength of a great Pearl Jam coffee table book of images by Lance Mercer that they released a few years back. Heading into the design and layout process we poured over band photo books and again and again the PJ book, 5x1, just felt right. I have to constantly remind myself that whereas Lance’s book contains several years, perhaps even a decade of photographs, the Fray book marks the passage of just one year. We’ve kept the book simple and clean so as not to provide any pretense to the idea that these photographs should only mark a period of existence in the Fray’s growth and nothing more.
15. Will you go on tour with them again?
I’ll always go back on the road. Still need to spend the night in South Dakota.
16. You play a little guitar…. Have you ever messed around with the band?
Tempe. April 2007. In the middle of the band’s set I played Poison’s “Every Rose Has Its Thorn” to 12,000 people. By far the most rock star experience of my life thus far. If you’re bored and in front of a computer check out YouTube.
17. How did you spend your time on the road?
If Joe were to answer this he’d probably say I spend too much time trying to meet girls. While I can’t deny this I think I spent most of my free time as the official breakfast spot and after show party coordinator. With my free time I was forever looking for something for all of us to do, mainly because these adventures would often provide me with a unique location to shoot in. I’m most proud of my Amelie movie location tour of Montmartre whilst in Paris this past fall.
18. Do they want to see a picture right after you take it? Or are they not so concerned with appearance.
The band has always trusted my creative process and vision. Very rarely do they ask to take a look at what I’ve been shooting and so I often find myself excited over a photograph trying to show them instead. Just this morning I was remarking to my filmmaker friend that not once during my fourteen weeks in the studio with the band this year did they ask to see any of the 140 hours of footage that was shot for the documentary. I’m always just trying to be a fly on the wall.
20. Who in the band do you work with the most?
Ben takes a lot of pride in the process of creating any visual associated with the band. The night before the opening show of the 2007 summer tour Ben stayed up all night at the Target Center in Minneapolis talking through lighting options with Joel Wojcik, the lighting designer. Together Ben and I narrowed down those 16,980 photographs to present the best of the best to the other three guys. Ben has always been a champion of my work, but all four band members have a hands on approach to everything I’ve created for them.
21. Where do you see yourself five years from now?
When I graduated college everyone had a five-year and a ten-year plan. All I wanted was in five years to have a five-year plan. It took me a few years after school to figure myself out, a few years to figure out what it was I needed to do with my life. I’ve spent the past five years scrapping for everything I have and I’m ready to scrap for the next five. A lot of people get hand outs in life but I can’t tell you how good it feels to be where I am right now all on my own accord. My goal has always been to create art that I’m proud of. That’ll never stop being the plan.
