SXSW Diaries: A photographer's retrospective

Contributing photographer Sebastien Dehsdin went to Texas earlier this month to shoot SXSW exclusively for us. Here, he reflects on the anticipation, challenges and realities of shooting possibly the greatest music festival in the world.

Since Sonar last year, I realised that one of the main difficulties of shooting a festival is carrying heavy photo gear around all day. From what I’ve heard, South by Southwest is worth the pain.

In the run-up to the festival, mention of it of it made those who have been in the past gloat and those who haven’t say they ‘really wanted to go one day’. Add to that the financial investment it requires to get there and I felt I really had to bring something special back.

I packed as if I was going to photograph the Royal Wedding: two camera bodies, three zooms, a prime lens and a flashgun. In a world where every other tweet lectures you about having a ‘vision’, I have no shame in saying this: I love my gear.

After retrieving my pass on the first day, I face the first hurdle: getting into a venue and securing a nice spot. It’s no mean feat, especially for hyper-buzzed acts like James Blake, which I naively tried to get into at stage time.

Soon I find my routine: get to the venue half an hour early, stay for the first ten minutes and then move on to the next venue.

The thing is: I like music. I really do. Repeatedly walking away from a band you’ve been dying to see for ages when you have the best seat in the house is a frustrating process.

The afternoon shows are better in that respect – you can indulge a bit more and ‘work’ for a photo, spending a good few minutes just for that one shot that you have in your head and that you try to produce. That’s one of the good things of covering an event with so many bands: you only really need a couple of good shots from each one.

It’s also refreshing to think globally – I didn’t want to have the same ten photos of ten different bands. I was, therefore, looking for the most original approach for each band, even if it meant losing a bit in terms of editorial content because I wasn’t focusing, for example, on the lead singer.

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Austra, not the lead singer

A friend who obviously has scant regard for my feelings told me recently that, ‘all music photography looks the same’. You and I know where she’s coming from. Past a certain technical level, if you give two photographers an expressive singer, a nice clear light and some basics in composition (eg stop tilting the camera into a Dutch Angle), they are likely to come back with two similar images, two ‘nice’ pictures.

I wanted to try to do more than that.

The Strokes were interesting in that respect. The photographers were supposed to be split into three groups, with each allowed one song. Yet it somehow turned into fifty of us pressed into a trench of a pit, flashes blazing and all taking the exact same picture. All I really needed was one photo to say I’d been there and then I could try to make another more interesting shot:

Is it more interesting?

It’s certainly different. And it gives some context to the story: is it enough to say ‘here is a photo of Julian Casablancas playing’?

Why not say instead: ‘here is a photo of Julian Casablancas playing. You can’t really see him properly but what you can see is the mass of photographers shooting him’. It matters because it’s the first concert for years that the Strokes have played in the US. There’s a story, not just a nice picture, and most of it is shown, not told.

One of things that can be annoying about SXSW if you don’t go there is the number of people assuring you that it is/was ‘crazy’, or even ‘absolutely mental’: a better description would simply be ‘busy’. Saying that, I missed the riot police for Death from Above 1979 – but the youtube video is fairly mild.

I finished my festival with a late night snack amongst some shuttle buddies at Denny’s. I took a photo when they were walking away and showed it to one of them the next day, and she said ‘Wow that’s a really cool picture. You have a nice camera’…