durham be easy: language arts, originally uploaded by minervacat.

This is for Martha.

Friday night’s Holy Ghost show was the 81st show I’ve seen this year (there are 78 of them here, and three (to date) that I didn’t shoot), and while most of them have been in standard venues — bars with stages, stages with bars at the back — I’ve seen a fair number in strange places, as well. Farmer’s markets, open air plazas, billiard halls while the Tennessee/Florida football game raged on TVs around the band. (I saw bitching online after Bristol, that the TVs should have been turned off in Borderline Billiards during the music, because it was disrespectful to the musicians to have people watching football while they played. Oh, idiotchildren on the internet: you’re in Tennessee, and you know what Tennesseeans love more than roots music and cars going fast in circles, both of which they love a whole lot? SEC football. Shut up and sit down, and understand that there were people in there specifically because they could both watch awesome bands and Kiffykins’ Great Moral Victory at the same time. God. Morons.)

And I think there’s something to be said for being able to sell a show in a non-standard venue. This shot is from one of those venues, the Durham Armory, during a Durham community event back in August, and it was a great show. A fantastic space for two suberb hip hop groups, a stage to get up over the crowd but a wide swath of floor for them to come down into the crowd, to move and to interact. I think there’s something to be said for being to rock an audience in an unusual venue, to be able to control your performance in a space that isn’t your norm. It speaks to the skills of the musicians in question, and there are days I’d rather shoot a great band in a weird space than a mediocre band in a standard space. I know what the inside of the 506 looks like (although, man, the lights have been fantastic the last two shows I’ve seen there; I hope it stays that way once I have a camera again), but the chance to shoot a band out of their element, or with a different sort of backdrop, can be really challenging, and exciting. It’s a step outside of a comfort zone. Sometimes you need to do that. Both me as a photographer, and, I think, bands I love as bands.

(Plus, how adorable is this boy? Super adorable.)