John Sheeran
It is as if Ed is conducting the Royal Albert Hall audience. The outstretched gestures and elated expressions of the crowd are reminiscent of a highly charged evangelical gathering.
— The Dirty Truth —
While flicking through the pictures in this book you might be wondering whether you too could pick up a camera and become a music photographer. When I’m in the pit waiting for the show to start, I am often asked by people in the front row how they could get into the pit because, let’s be honest, it’s a place where many would love to be. That’s the lure of my job when you look in from the outside – the beguiling notion that you can stand almost within touching distance of those superstars and witness their performance up close and personal.
I’d like to share with you what my job in the pit really entails. A music photographer shoots live concerts and portraits of musicians. Some are there to shoot for media; a few might be working for the venue; one or two might be hired by the artist’s management. During the 1950s and 1960s professional photographers were increasingly hired to cover concerts, and slowly but surely some photographers started specializing only in music. In the decades that followed popular music got bigger and more and more professional, and in the last decade or so the internet has exploded, with social media now driven by images. Professional music photography has changed with the times. Today those photographers you find in the pit mostly shoot for print or online media and are mostly freelancers with a day job. I shot a lot for the media at first, but these days many photographers are lucky to get a couple of pounds or dollars for a concert photo. I know – quite an eye opener, isn’t it? I’ve always wanted to make a living as a photographer, so my aim from the start was to work for the artists themselves. That’s what I do now. So how did I actually get here?
Back when I was studying photography, in my final year we had to present our work to an independent jury that not only judged your work but would also fire a collection of questions at you to see if you were industry ready. I must admit that I had dreaded that whole part of the circus because I’m not solid when I am put on the spot. When I finally found myself in front of the firing squad, I was asked an array of questions about the work I was presenting. I thought I was doing well, until they threw a curveball at me: one of the jury members asked me what I wanted to achieve in my career after I left college. The question totally caught me off guard and I felt the floor sink from beneath me. My mind went blank. I truthfully didn’t know what to say. All I wanted was to take pictures. A long awkward silence took hold of the room and the members of the jury in front of me were shifting uneasily in their chairs while I was racking my brain to come up with an answer.
All I could think of was a song I had heard on the radio before I had come to the interview. It was “The Cover of ‘Rolling Stone’” by Dr. Hook & The Medicine Show. The chorus of that song kept repeating in my head, so that’s what I said: “I want my picture on the cover of Rolling Stone magazine.” The members of the jury were taken aback. They thought I was awfully ambitious setting such high goals. They gave me a glowing review for my presentation and ambition.
Looking back at it now I have to admit that, despite my little panic moment, I did have dreams and things I wanted to achieve. I had this wild dream of owning my own studio where I would be taking pictures all day long, with a backyard where I’d sit and drink wine with my friends while having deep intriguing philosophical conversations. I dreamed of having these elaborate and hugely successful exhibitions in all corners of the globe with rave reviews. Maybe I just wasn’t ready yet to share my dreams with the world when I was asked that question.
As the years passed, I have never stopped dreaming. I have always wanted to be able to create images, to capture beauty, to chase that perfect picture.
Depending on whom you ask, success means different things. If you were to ask me, I’d say it means turning my passion into a successful career. The first step in achieving success is to establish what success means to you. Everyone has a talent, something they are really good at. You just have to find yours and put in the effort to make yourself better at it. Set goals, and set them high, much higher than seems realistic. You also need to be really passionate because just talent without any passion is a bit like a car without fuel.
I was often told that I was wasting my time trying to achieve success with my work. People will always try to put you down. Dreaming is often considered a waste of time. The truth of the matter is that the first step to achieving success is to envision it. And for every hour you spend envisioning your success you may come one step closer to actually reaching it. So, to anyone out there who has a dream: dream, dream, dream your dreams. They are the foundations of your career. But they are useless without persistence. Many times I was driven to the brink of desperation and was ready to give up photography. Just like Ed when he first started out must have had moments, too, when he thought he was getting nowhere, but he just persisted. Talent alone won’t cut it. You need passion to fuel it; you need bravery to accept failure. Failure is not only inevitable, but a necessary step on your way to success. Just like Ed at one time had a dream to reach an audience with his music, to touch people with his lyrics, to be able to collaborate with people he admired. Today there aren’t enough adjectives to describe the measure of his success. He’s got his awards, he’s got his MBE, he’s got his sold-out tours, he’s done his list of impressive collaborations. I’ve heard the critics on the sidelines saying that it all came quite easy to him. But, take it from me, Ed’s success was achieved by sheer determination, with a lot of hardship and falling and getting back up on the pony.
So, I had my Rolling Stone dream and a degree, and almost immediately life took me somewhere else entirely. It took me 25 years of shooting pretty much everything apart from music, and not chasing my goals at all, to finally wake up and pursue my old dream with everything I had. More than ever before people told me I was nuts. I knocked on doors and begged for photo passes. Most doors stayed closed, some opened, and I kept knocking. I shot a lot in clubs and did a lot of heavy metal gigs at first (for some reason, it was easier to get a photo pass at metal festivals). I learned how to shoot concerts, how to feel the show as much as hear it, how to shoot in low light conditions. I have never stopped studying and experimenting since my first days at college. I know my cameras inside out. I learned how to use Lightroom, my favourite editing software. I kept my portfolio updated, invested in a decent website, did anything I could to get shoots and get my work seen. And eventually more doors opened.
It all seems pretty straightforward but there is a dirty truth. Music photography is one of the toughest fields to make a living in. Pretty much all other fields of photography are more lucrative. So, unless you have a real passion for this one, don’t even think about it. For those very few who are able to do this as a full-time job, it’s a tough lifestyle. It’s not nine-to-five days, five days a week with the weekends off. When you’re on a job, it’s often 20 hours a day, and when you’re on a tour, there are no days off, because when the artist isn’t performing, I’m still editing. So there’s no social life outside the music bubble, and you can’t really plan much ahead because in most cases the photographer is hired last, not first. Most jobs tend to be last-minute calls. My first really big tour was the European leg of Usher’s OMG tour in 2011. His then manager, Rob Hallett, called us, and asked if we were free for two months and whether we could be on a plane the next day to Berlin. That is the nature of the business.
There’s no job security in music photography, and actually the same goes for most people in music in general. You have to constantly knock on doors, sell yourself, negotiate, and understand that it will take a few hundred “no thank yous” (and a few hundred more “no replies”) before you get that first big “yes”. There have been periods in my career when I was staring into a great dark void, with no commissions for months ahead. In the first couple of years, while still mainly shooting in clubs and at metal festivals, I’ve worked at a cancer research centre, and have been a personal assistant to a rabbi and personal assistant to a lawyer in London. A girl’s gotta do what a girl’s gotta do to make ends meet.
Once you are on the job, it involves a lot of waiting and just hanging around. You don’t know when you’ll get an opportune moment to shoot. We call it “hurry up and wait”. I have spent more time sitting on flight cases in a backstage corridor than I care to remember. I have fallen asleep on them, too. They don’t roll out a red carpet for you when you get on a tour. The artist and the touring crew work their butts off every day and night, often getting by with just a couple of hours of sleep in a bunk on a bus that is less comfortable than most coffins, all so that the audience can have those magical two hours every night. It involves a lot of logistics, unexpected problems and teamwork to put it all in place. My advice to you is to never forget that you are “only” a photographer because in all honesty, everyone from management to the catering staff is so much more important than you are because they all work towards that one goal: put on the best show ever. You’re just there to capture the fruits of their hard work.
So why am I still doing this after knowing and living the dirty truth, day in and day out? I can honestly tell you that there have been many moments throughout my career that I have asked myself that very question, but then . . . the music starts and the crowd cheers, and the adrenaline starts pumping through my veins. The singer grabs the mic and right there in that moment I feel happy, I feel secure, I feel content, I feel like I can conquer it all, and I wouldn’t change it for the world.