Jerome Albertini Annalisa Janette Beckman Teri Bloom Chris Buck Danny Clinch Michel Comte Mo Daoud Matthew Dean Peter Dokus Sante D'orazio George Dubose Roger Erickson Davis Factor Jesse Frohman Marc Hom T. Hopkins Gregory Jackson Hassan Jarane Eric Johnson Jeffrey Kane David Katzenstein Kevin Knight David LaChapelle Christian Lantry Michael Lavine Robert Lewis Dana Lixenberg Anthony Mandler Jonathan Mannion Clay Patrick McBride Ernie Paniccioli Adam Port Ebet Roberts Matthew Salacuse Michael Schreiber Mark Seliger Jamel Shabazz Piotr Sikora Atsuko Tanaka Max Vadukul Nitin Vadukul Cesar Vera Christian Witkin         Danny Clinch Danny Clinch is a man who follows his muse wherever it leads. His passion for photography and love of music have made him one of the most visible photographers of the past decade. His work appears on album covers and liner art for artists as diverse as Johnny Cash, Foo Fighters, The Roots, Afghan Whigs, and Ben Harper. It is used in a countless number of promotional and magazine portraits, and he has documented the Tibetan Freedom Concert since its inception in 1996. In short, he has made a lasting impact on the music and photography worlds over the past ten years...and is only just getting started. Born in Tom's River, NJ, in 1964, Danny attended Ocean County Community College for two years when he decided he wanted to focus on photography as a career. "I was always interested in art and photography," he says, "but I thought I should lean towards photo. You should always focus on one thing you're excited about." He searched around for a trade school to attend, but found it a daunting task as most of the bigger schools he looked at would not accept any of the credits he accumulated in Community College. Finally, he settled on The New England School Of Photography, a two-year institution in Boston. He discovered the ad in the back of a photo magazine, and upon visiting, decided it was for him. "They were real people there, not pretentious," he says. "It had bare essential facilities, but I felt comfortable." After graduating in 1985, Danny took part in two photographic workshops: Bruce Davidson's "The Photograph As A Document," and The Ansel Adams Workshop In Yosemite, which was coordinated by Annie Liebowitz. Working with Liebowitz yielded a great return; he was invited to intern for her in 1986. He worked his way up to her full time assistant, giving him the opportunity to travel the country with her. "It was necessary and crucial to work with other photographers," says Danny. Indeed - he has also put in time with Mary Ellen Mark, Stephen Meizel, and Timothy White. He began to get sporadic assignments while assisting, but as he put it, "I took what I could get as long as somebody paid for my film and processing." Band portraiture worked its way into Danny's work early on. "I was always a lover of photojournalism and music. At Community College, I had a photojournalism class, so I started to apply what I learned to music photography." He discovered a Boston-area alternative rock band called Rick Berlin: The Movie, and began to document them in portraits. However, he says he preferred shooting more spontaneous situations, such as concerts. "I do set-up shots all the time, but to me, the ultimate setup would be somebody in a room, practicing guitar, ambient lighting...just getting that moment." Danny started to shoot for Spin Magazine in 1992, first shooting the New York City hip-hop act 3rd Base. It was around this time that hip-hop was starting to emerge into the mainstream, and Danny on a whim brought his photos to Steve Karr of Def Jam Records. The two hit it off, and he began to shoot other acts on the rise like Public Enemy and L.L. Cool J, getting his pictures seen by other record labels and musicians. As he describes it, there wasn't a big budget for hip-hop photographers at the time, since the genre was still up and coming. "But before you knew it, these bands were all considered big stars, and I had them in my portfolio." From there, it didn't take much longer for Danny's work to branch off into the alternative rock world, and then across the musical board. While he is best known for photographing musicians, his interests go far beyond the confines of portraiture. "I shoot pictures all the time, and not just music stuff. I shoot anything that appeals to me - cars, people on the street..." In 1995, Greg Dulli - frontman of the moody rock quartet Afghan Whigs - approached Danny with the idea of doing some conceptual photography to illustrate the band's upcoming LP, Black Love. "He described to me this look he wanted: film noir, gritty black and white images. He gave me plenty of time to work on it, and he and I collaborated on it. We talked about illustrating each song with a photo, with him coming up for the ideas for some, and me coming up with the ideas for others." The end result is an absolutely stirring series of twelve photographs found on the inner booklet of Black Love. A harrowing shot of a dead bird illustrates the album's longing closing cut, "Faded," and an image of frantic fire fighters echoes the urgency of "Going To Town." A simple yet powerful picture of black and white lips joining is matched with "Summer's Kiss," and a man in hiding beneath a windowsill conveys the fear and intensity of "Blame, etc." In the end, the Black Love photographs are some of the most evocative - and least recognized - of Danny's career. "It seems to be the least published of my stuff, so one of the things I purposely incorporate into my portfolios are non-people pictures, or 'breathing photographs,'" Danny says. Following pages of portraits, he will include a small series of 2 to 10 pictorial images to break things up. "I actually wound up getting a good job out of that because of detail stuff," he says. The job he is referring to is a gig photographing the Tibetan Freedom Concert, a festival created by Adam Yauch of the seminal New York Hip-Hop crew The Beastie Boys, to create awareness of the persecution of Tibetans in China. Danny was friends with Shelby Mead, the Beasties' publicist at the Nasty Little Man PR firm. Shelby gave Danny a peek at the lineup of the first festival, held in Los Angeles in 1996. The roster boasted big names like Rage Against The Machine, Beck, Sonic Youth, and the Beasties themselves. "He told me 'If you can pay your own way out, I'll give you an all access pass to the festival as long as we can use your pictures afterwards," Danny says. He wound up hanging a backdrop in the backstage area and taking portraits of the artists in addition to shooting the festival itself. He ended up with thoughts of producing a book, as well as a heightened awareness of what was going on across the world. "There would be a press conference before the show each day, and there would be nuns and monks there," Danny recalls. "They had spent 20 or 30 years in prison because of their religion; Chinese police would find religious paraphanelia on them and throw them in jail. ... I'm not an activist, but I do really strongly believe that people deserve their human rights. People should have the right do do what they want to do, to practice whatever religion they want." Danny has had a hand in every Tibetan Freedom Festival since, and photos he has taken along the way are now gathered in his latest book, When The Iron Bird Flies. The book is Danny's second; his first, Discovery Inn, was released in November of 1998, and is a compilation of the best of his portraiture. He describes the project as "gathering some friends, dumping all my pictures on a table, and going through them over several months." Two of the most distinctive features of Danny's work are the inclusion of black borders around his images, and varying format sizes. The black borders are seen in both his black and white and color work, and are achieved by filing out his negative carriers, and as he explains it, there are two reasons for their inclusion. "First, with full frame shooting...that's what I saw in the lens, those are the decisions I made when taking the photograph, and everything in the frame is important to me. And second, I just like the rough edges." Danny also uses a wealth of camera formats. He sticks to his 35mm Leica most frequently, has taken some notable portraits on 2 1/4 (Thom Yorke) and 4x5 (Tupac Shakur), and worked with 8x10 on Phish's last record. But as he puts it, "those aren't even half the formats I use." His arsenal is also built of 1/2 frames, a Holga (an all plastic camera), a Diana (an earlier Holga from the late 1950's), an old passport-photograph 4x5, a widelux panoramic camera, and an old poleroid 3 1/2 x 4 1/2. Danny currently has a gallery exhibition in Washington DC, his first series that will be shown for an extended period of time. The show is a combination of all his music-the med work, combining images from both books as well as out takes, for an overall career spanning set. He also has a film project in the works, documenting folk-funk singer-songwriter Ben Harper on tour. "It has concert footage in it," he says, "but it is definitely not a concert film." What does the future hold? Danny sees himself leaning away from music photography into the realm of a more pictorial body of work. "I feel like I've expressed myself in the music field as much as I can," he says, "and I'll continue to work with it because I love it, but I've been moving towards street photography, architecture, but non-traditional...I want to go somewhere with my photography that I haven't seen anybody go yet in order to keep myself excited about it." Wherever he winds up, the results shouldn't be any less than stellar. -John Vettese < < Click on an Immortal Photographer.