Northside Festival | Carlos Detres: Photographer

Bands Without Faces

I got my start in NYC photographing bands for temporarily-defunct The Whiskey Dregs. Free shows. Free music. Cool people and interesting venues — all with various lighting conditions and a sometimes adherence to non-flash photography, which is a bitch when you’re shooting at places like Mercury Lounge with dim moody lighting. I’d take a shot and pause to review it on my tiny LCD screen. Sometimes it’d look sharp and right and others it’d look blurry with light smearing the background. Although unusable, these shots would often become favorites which would be sadly relegated to the un-flagged pile of my digital contact sheets.

I enjoy the abstractions of light, the contours of the human body and how it could be pulled apart like sci-fi film experiment. I rarely ever look at these though I feel that they more accurately portray the feeling of the artists’ music — the mood and the action. A couple years ago, I wanted to make a whole series of these. Blurred portraits of indie bands on the up-and-up but I never pursued it. It might have been a fun project.

To be clear, most of these are happy mistakes.

Various Locations
New York City
2009-2011

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