“I’m not a professional,” says Kyle Gustafson. “But I play one on the Internet.”
The cameraman doth protest too much. Though Gustafson still pays the bills as a Web editor for a publishing company, his hobby-turned-second-career as a music photographer has in recent years made him a fixture of D.C.’s concert venues. But it isn’t his face that’s getting famous‚ it’s his eye.
Gustafson began posting his photos on the picture-sharing site Flickr, and on his widely read music and sports blog, Information Leafblower, in 2006. Since then, his images, which manage to evince dynamic composition and painterly lighting while still capturing the sweat and clamor of a rock show, have appeared in a steadily growing list of blogs and publications.
Gustafson’s work is on view in I’m With the Band, an exhibition curated by Ten Miles Square founder Heather Goss that features five concert shots apiece from Gustafson and two other prolific photobloggers, Martin Locraft and Nestor Diaz.
Though it’s only in the last few years that Gustafson, 34, has won guest list status, he traces his predilection for nocturnal shutterbuggery back to a 1996 summer internship with Epic Records in New York City. As an undergrad at East Carolina University, he felt starved for live music that agreed with his Anglocentric tastes. (Oasis, Morrissey and Radiohead are, as the Brits say, massive with him).
“When I went to New York, I said, ‘I’m going to go to as many shows as I can,’ ” Gustafson recalls. “I saw over 100 bands that summer … I took photos at those shows with a $40 Kodak Instamatic fold-up camera that I bought at CVS.”
After college, he worked for seven years in the music industry in Manhattan. Once “being paid in CDs and concert tickets” wore out its appeal, he came to Washington in 2004 seeking “a real job.”
Though Gustafson has branched out into shooting sports events, too, including D.C. United matches and last summer’s Legg Mason Tennis Classic, his self-taught curriculum has remained largely tethered to his love of live music: He’s spent years “trying to learn to take photos in the dark” without a flash, he says. “Sometimes I have problems taking photos outside, because I have no idea what to do.”
At least two shots in the exhibit prove Gustafson doesn’t choke in the presence of his heroes. To get the close-up of a squinting-in-ecstasy Morrissey from a 2007 Constitution Hall appearance that Gustafson calls his all-time favorite shot, he had to fight the butterflies in his stomach, the clock and the singer’s microphone cord, which swatted Gustafson in the face as he was changing cameras. (Mic cords are heavier than you think.) It’s typical for performers to restrict photography to two or three songs at big venues; Morrissey allowed only two. Also, his songs are very brief.
Winning his chilling image of Radiohead’s Jonny Greenwood from the band’s Nissan Pavilion concert last May was a trial of a different scale. Biblical quantities of rain fell on Bristow for hours before, after and all through the show. Coupled with biting winds and temperatures just above freezing, the rain made the gig — despite the band’s electrifying performance — miserable for anyone not dressed in waterproof layers. Flooded roads prevented thousands from even reaching the venue.
“People say, ‘Oh, this guy is so lucky. He gets to go to all these shows!,’ ” Gustafson says. “I don’t think they realize I leave the show early, I go home, I sit in front of my computer for two hours in the middle of the night, editing hundreds of photos down to the 10 or 15 that are going to make it on the Net. It’s a lot of hard work! But it’s hard work I love doing.”
If you go
I’m With the Band
Where: Dahlak, 1771 U St. NW
When: Through May 3
Info: Free; tenmilessquarecom
