The Decisive and Unobstructed Moment

By: Jamie Brisick | December 02, 2008 | Photography

I heard about Danny Clinch before I met him. I was hired by a passionate and forthright friend to photograph a yoga intensive in upstate New York. I was treading lightly, trying not to disrupt the domino-like rows of headstands when, during lunch, my friend boiled it down for me.
“Look, you need to get in there, you need to fully immerse yourself, you need to never not have at least one camera around your neck at all times because that way people forget you have a camera. You need to be the fly on the wall, but you also need to get right in the mix. You need to wait and watch and never ever miss the moment. Basically, you need to be more like Danny Clinch.”

Sure enough, when I met Danny at a Radiohead show at Liberty State Park in Jersey City a year or so later, he had a Leica M6 around his neck, which seemed less a camera than a kind of appendage, and he was both fully present and fully distracted. I vividly recall the way, mid-sentence, without missing a beat, he raised his camera to his eye, snapped off a shot of what I thought was the row of American flags raised high into the air, and then kept on talking.

The night would prove to be memorable on several fronts. First, Radiohead put in a stellar, vaguely sarcastic performance. Second, there was the stage in the foreground, the Statue of Liberty off to the right, and the regal and luminous Twin Towers behind, which evoked a kind of collective patriotism. Third, the concert took place on Aug. 17, 2001, and thus would take on even greater significance as time passed.
About a year later, I was looking at Danny’s Web site when I came across his photo of the flags, the one he’d shot mid-sentence. And though at the time it seemed only vaguely related to a Radiohead concert in Liberty State Park, with hindsight it seems almost prescient, the essence of the night captured before we had any idea what the essence would be. Danny Clinch is from New Jersey, he’s one of the greatest rock ’n’ roll photographers living today, he’s sincere and down-to-earth, he coaches his son’s and daughters’s soccer teams, and his approach to photography is mercurial and improvisational.

JB: How’d you get into it?
DC: I got into photography when I was really young. I liked to draw and I liked to pick up my mom’s camera, and I just had a natural interest in photography. And people would always ask me what I wanted to do when I grew up, which was a scary question ’cause I wasn’t interested in working a normal job, so I just said that I wanted to be a photographer, you know, it sounded like an interesting job. And I was always going to concerts and I was always into music, big time. I’d go to concerts and sneak my camera in and shoot some pictures, just for fun. So in a way, the two just sort of came together naturally. And when I went to school for photography, the photojournalism teacher there was also into music and so I made assignments out of shooting bands. I would find a local band and document backstage, and photograph the show and capture all of it.
JB: That seems to really come through in your pictures. I get the sense that there’s a rapport with your subjects, an intimacy beyond just going in for half an hour, and getting the shot.
DC: Interesting you should say that, because often that can be the case — I go in and I just have an hour with the subject. But I’m always trying to capture a moment, and I’m coming in and trying to respond to what’s there. Like, if [the publicist] says you’ve got 15 minutes with the musician in his hotel room, some photographers might go in with a lot of equipment and try to bring his vision to the subject, which is cool. But I like to go in and respond to what’s there: Is there window light? Is there a cool lamp? Is there an interesting chair? For me, sometimes I’m trying to get out of the way and just get, like, two or three frames of that one moment. It’s much more the documentary approach.

JB: What makes a great photo?
DC: For me, if I boiled it down to the one thing, it’s about the moment. I think light and composition factors in, but if you’ve got the moment, that means the most. You can have all the other things, but you have to have the moment.

JB: With that in mind, do you gravitate more towards smaller, on-the-fly-type cameras?
DC: I don’t put myself in a box. I shoot with a lot of different cameras. I’ll do a really set-up portrait where I’ll shoot large or medium format; but I’ll also do more photojournalism.

JB: Out of all your pictures, is there one that stands out as a favorite?
DC: There’s many. One of them is the Johnny Cash shot. Basically, that photograph kind of tied together a lot of things that were working for me, in the sense that I’d spent a couple hours doing portraits of him and I was happy with those photos, and I had my time with him, uninterrupted, me and Johnny Cash. But after it was over, I asked if I could just hang out before he went onstage and he agreed, and right before he went on I snapped the photo. And it’s just a real honest moment of Johnny Cash backstage. And I think, you know, you could bring assistants, try to set something up and try to force something to happen, but if you’re just there, alone, you can say so much more with half the effort.

JB: Any great stories from the field?
DC: Oh yes! Wow, I could just go on forever. One of the great photo moments, I was photographing Neil Young and I had one of those “you’ve got an hour with him at the hotel” type scenarios. And so I was in Nashville, and knowing that Neil likes old cars, I found this guy who was selling a 1947 Cadillac. And I talked the guy into bringing it to the hotel and parking it there. And I said to Neil, “We’ll do some shots in the hotel, then when we’re done, I’ve got this old Cadillac and I’d love to do some photos of you in the Caddy, and maybe we could do some pictures of you in front of the Ryman.” And Neil said, “That’s cool,” and we did the photos, and then the tour manager, who’s a good friend of mine, came out and says, “Hey, you know, we’re kind of running behind and we’ve got some other interviews and you know, if you think you got it, maybe we better wrap it up.” And Neil comes in and goes, “No, We’re driving this. In fact we’re driving this car to the Ryman.” So we ended up driving all over Nashville then taking the Caddy to the Ryman Auditorium.

JB: You’ve worked with some incredible people.
DC: I feel really fortunate. It’s pretty amazing really. I’m always trying to find common ground to make it a fun, comfortable time.

JB: You seem to have taken it up a few notches over the last couple years. Like, you were doing great stuff, but now you’re doing really, really great stuff.
DC: I think, like anything else, when you do something long enough you can kind of get right to the point and trim away the fat. For the most part, I can walk into a situation and know what’s going to work and what’s not, and that allows me to push the envelope a bit more. I can get in there, assess the situation and really just get to the point

JB: Who are your favorite photographers?
DC: I’m a fan of a lot of the documentary photographers, but for music, I’m a fan of Jim Marshall, the documentary work of Annie Leibovitz and Anton Corbijn. I like Danny Lyon and Robert Frank. I really like the work of Walter Iooss — he’s a guy who hasn’t allowed himself to get pigeonholed. He’s a sports photographer, but he uses different formats and the way he shoots is all over the map. And of course I’m a huge fan of Irving Penn and Richard Avedon.

JB: Do you have a favorite band?
DC: It’s interesting. Sometimes you get to work with someone and your opinion of their music either gets better or worse. And I’ve always been a big Springsteen fan. I mean, I grew up in New Jersey and the music was always special to me, but getting to know him has just cranked it up another notch. I’m also a huge Neil Young fan, Tom Waits fan and a big Willie Nelson fan, but what was really cool was that I was around the first time Radiohead came to America, and I traveled with those guys and spent time on the road with them and photographed them when they were just coming up, and I have so much material of those guys.

JB: When I look at your pictures I see a lot of “fly on the wall” type shots, as if the subject has no idea you’re even there.
DC: Those pictures look natural and they seem really natural, but I tell ya, I invest a lot of time and I’m really paying attention to being in the right place at the right time when those moments are happening. People say to me, like, “Oh, you’re so lucky.” But you know, there’s no luck about it.

JB: Tell me a bit about the film work you’re doing.
DC: I just did the new Lucinda Williams cover, which I’m real excited about. And I also shot the cover and directed a video for the upcoming Willie Nelson and Wynton Marsalis album. And I’m also working on a documentary with Stone Gossard from Pearl Jam, which is part of a Timberland project called “Dig It” that’s about planting trees and educating people about how to take care of trees, and it has an environmental and social message, which I’m real excited about.

*Special thanks to Tim Donnelly

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