Local Artists Through My Lens

The Sound of the City

There is a sound to every city, but you don’t always have to hear it to know it’s there. Sometimes you can see it. It’s in the lights hitting a performer’s face, the artist standing backstage getting their mind right, the crowd reaching toward the stage, or that split second when somebody forgets there’s a camera in the room. Over the past year, I’ve had the opportunity to photograph local artists at different stages of their journeys, and somewhere along the way I realized I wasn’t just taking pictures of performances.

Two Denver artists performing together onstage during a live local hip-hop show in Denver, Colorado.

I was documenting culture.

Music photography taught me to look beyond the microphone. The performance matters, but I’m interested in the moments surrounding it too. The facial expressions. The clothes. The movement. The confidence. The nervousness. The artist sitting alone for a second before getting back up. Two performers connecting onstage. Somebody completely lost in their music. Those moments tell me just as much about an artist as the moment when the spotlight hits.

Three female performers sharing the stage during a live Denver music performance, captured in a dramatic, selectively colored photograph.

Denver female artist crouched onstage during an expressive moment at a live local music performance.

My editing has become part of that storytelling. Sometimes the photograph needs all the color the stage gave me. Sometimes it needs to be dark, grainy and black and white. Sometimes I want to take the original photograph somewhere completely different and turn it into something closer to graphic art. I don’t believe every artist should look the same through my lens because every artist brings a different energy into the room. My job is to recognize it and figure out how I want that energy to live inside the photograph.

What makes local music special is that you get to witness people while they’re still building. These are artists creating identities, developing sounds, experimenting with fashion, performing in intimate rooms and putting their work in front of people who may be experiencing them for the first time. Years from now, some of these photographs may mean something completely different than they do today. That’s one of the things I love about photography—you never really know when you’re photographing history.

Denver independent artist performing onstage with a microphone during a live local music show.

I came to photograph the performance, but somewhere along the way I started documenting the culture.

And maybe that’s what The Sound of the City really is. Not one artist, one genre, one venue or one night. It’s hundreds of individual moments happening around us, each adding another piece to the creative identity of the city. I just happen to have my camera with me when some of them happen.