Tonight, the Lethal Amounts space in Downtown Los Angeles will host the opening for "601 Photographs", an exhibition from Nick Zinner, the guitarist of Yeah Yeah Yeahs. It’s a continuation of the "501 Photographs" show that ran at Photoville in Brooklyn in 2013. Zinner picked the images from the thousands he’s shot since co-founding Yeah Yeah Yeahs over a decade ago. Most of them were taken while on tour with bandmates Karen O and Brian Chase, or during his own travels. Here he highlights nine photos from the show and tells the stories behind them.
Nick Zinner: That’s in London. I’m pretty sure when we had gone over to do press and play shows for the It’s Blitz record. I like the, for lack of a better word, intangible quality to it. It has a nice feeling and introspective emotion to it. I have thousands of her.
Pitchfork: Do your bandmates still even notice you taking their photos?
NZ: They’re used to it by now. Usually they give me free license, and they’ll let me know when they definitely don’t want their picture taken. I would never take that privilege for granted. I always ask them for approval of any image of them that I would put publicly out in the world.
NZ: When Yeah Yeah Yeahs put out the Is Is EP, we made a live film for it. We were making a video for "Down Boy", but we also played a whole show. There were two shows, the first one was only girls and the second show was co-ed. Everybody wore masks and we played totally in the dark and filmed it in night vision.
Pitchfork: You’re known for taking photos of the crowd at every show. Do you take one shot or is it multiple frames?
NZ: I try to take a lot. My favorite photos are the ones where people don’t really see me. I’m more interested in looking at people looking at things. I’ve tried all sorts of crazy ways to get sneaky with it. There was one tour we did where I had a camera on a tripod that was between the monitors pointing at the crowd and then I had a shutter release attached to something that I could hit with my foot. Most of the time, if I’m fast enough and the camera that I’m working with is fast enough, it’s usually fine, because most people are watching Karen.
Pitchfork: Are you doing it in-between songs or in the middle of songs while you’re actively playing?
NZ: Especially on the last few tours we’ve done, we’ve tried not to have any silence in-between songs, so usually we have a loop going. "Zero" has this really long keyboard intro that’s just a 16th note, or "Cheated Hearts" has the same kind of sample pulse intro. Those moments we like to stretch out to a painfully long time, so those are good moments [to take photos], but in times like that it’s harder to get the type of picture I want, but it’s nice to have pictures of all our awesome fans and just that moment.
NZ: This is from a festival that we played where Kraftwerk were doing their 3D show. I just snuck in the photo pit after we played. I think it’s more interesting if you don’t know what the photo is, in a way. Or it’s just weirder.
NZ: That’s from South By Southwest, 2013. It’s that quiet time before we go on. That quiet, nervous time.
Pitchfork: It’s still nervous for you guys?
NZ: Fuck yeah.
Pitchfork: Why?
NZ: I don’t think for Brian as much, but definitely for Karen and I. It just gets so anxious. My heart is beating really fast, and it’s non-stop pacing and kicking things.
Pitchfork: Every time?
NZ: Yeah. It’s pretty bad.
Pitchfork: Is it the possibility of things going wrong?
NZ: It’s not so much that something can go wrong, because things go wrong all the time and you deal with them. Everyone always says pre-show jitters, but I can’t put my finger on exactly what it is. It’s not really fear, and it’s not just excitement, because we’re not giddy. I don’t know what it is, but it still happens, pretty much with anything.
NZ: That’s in Morocco. I think it’s in Essaouira. I went there for a few weeks by myself, maybe in 2011, and just wandered around, took photos. I wanted to hear some Gnawa music, which I really like from over there. I’m a huge Nirvana fan and I like seeing things that at first seem out of context, but actually they’re one of the biggest bands in the world. I like to see pop culture, like punk or alternative culture, clash with some other type of culture.
NZ: That’s also in Morocco, in Marrakesh. It was just one of those things when something lines up so perfectly, you’ve really got to take it. I’m a big fan of Henri Cartier-Bresson, the French photographer who had that whole "decisive moment" approach to taking pictures, of having multiple elements line up within the frame.
Pitchfork: Do you always carry a camera with you, besides what’s on your phone?
NZ: I go through phases. It definitely helps if I can wear a jacket, because I can have a camera in my pocket. When we’re on tour or if I go travel somewhere by myself, that’s when I take the most photos. Last year I was only taking pictures with my iPhone, thinking that it was doing the same thing, but I was really wrong. Those pictures don’t look that great and I regret that in hindsight, not even having that basic documentation, mostly because I have a terrible memory. Any special or unusual situation I find myself in makes me want to leave with something. Photography has always been important to me for that, being able to make sense of something or understand something or remember something or laugh at something.
NZ: That’s in Tokyo in, I think, 2012. There’s nothing very interesting about the circumstances.
Pitchfork: I imagine you were coming up the escalator and saw her coming down and just waited to catch that second.
NZ: Yeah, that’s really it. It’s as simple as that.
NZ: That’s from Bamako in Mali, I think two years ago. I was there as part of a program that Damon Albarn from Gorillaz and Blur started called Africa Express where he brings western musician to different countries in Africa to collaborate with them. Or they put on four or five-hour shows in different countries with African musicians and western musicians. I’ve been lucky enough to be a part of this organization since 2010 and it’s completely changed my life, because it’s changed my thoughts on music. It’s been incredibly powerful and I’ve been grateful to those guys for allowing me to be part of it.
That photo is taken from this building that we all took over and set up some studios. Damon wanted to make a record in a week and there was like 20 of us, mostly English people, I think I was the only American there. The reason that Damon wanted to do that was to show solidarity and support for a lot of the musicians who used to live in the north of Mali and Timbuktu who all had to flee when different factions of jihadists came in and imposed Sharia law, banning music. As I’ve learned in the past few years, Mali is home to some of the most incredible musicians in the world. The fact that so many people whose livelihood depends on being able to play, it’s just crazy. There’s a film coming out next year that I scored called They Will Have to Kill Us First that details this whole story, it’s a documentary. There’s also the film Timbuktu, which is not a documentary, but is a beautiful story of this horrendous time. In any case, I ended up meeting this band called Songhoy Blues there. We did one song together at that time, and then I went back six months later to do their record. It was really fun.
So that’s from that studio area looking down on some guys doing karate practice. It was insane and totally beautiful at the same time.
NZ: That’s one of these photos, I have no idea where it’s from. I can’t remember.