Nick Zinner, “Crowd, Paris, April 2009,” archival ink jet print on resin coated paper, 2009 (© Nick Zinner)
Anastasia Photo
166 Orchard St. between Stanton & Rivington Sts.
Through June 4, free, 11:00 am – 7:00 pm
212-677-9725
www.anastasia-photo.com
Musician, producer, photographer, and Creators Project renaissance man Nick Zinner has been performing as a member of the popular indie band Yeah Yeah Yeahs since the group’s founding in September 2000, releasing the Grammy-nominated records Fever to Tell (2003), Show Your Bones (2006), and It’s Blitz! (2009). Although Zinner, who was born in Massachusetts and has been based in New York City for more than a decade, is used to the camera being turned on him, he has been taking pictures for many years, having studied photography at Bard and released several books, both solo and in collaboration with others, including No Seats in the Party Car (2001) and Please Take Me Off the Guest List (2010). His latest exhibit, on view at Anastasia Photo on the Lower East Side through June 4, consists of half a dozen shots he took of crowds at Yeah Yeah Yeahs shows between 2003 and 2009, taken from the stage. The audience is either grooving to the band or waiting for them to go on; sometimes the crowd recognizes that Zinner is taking a photo and poses for it, and other times they are just caught up in the frenzy of the performance. In one picture, fans reach out to him with sheer joy; in a second, a group of young women dressed in black, wearing black eye masks, are too cool to show any emotion at all; and in a third, one woman makes a crazy face while others smile away. Of course, pictures of crowds at concerts are not unusual, but it is rare for the shots to have been taken by one of the band members, offering a different perspective from photos snapped by hired music photographers. The photos were taken at concerts in Paris, Beijing, Brooklyn, Tuscon, Warsaw, and Tokyo; see if you can guess which is which before looking at the titles. (Zinner will also be playing alongside experimental films with fellow YYY Brian Chase, Oneida’s Shahin Motia, and MV Carbon at Molly Surno’s latest Cinema 16 presentation, June 3 at 7:00 at the Metropolitan Museum of Art.)