“He’s given a box of toys to play with and he starts making a pretend world with it … instead of looking hammy or silly, it looks like a crazy dreamĭe Wilde first encountered Beck around 1989 or 1990, she says, at a poetry slam in Los Angeles. Of ideas to Beck, he jumps on them,” she says. Often, de Wilde will bring a location or props or an idea to the singer, but no set strategy. Similarly, while many of de Wilde’s portraits have a surreal, even dadaesque quality - Beck with candy-colored inventory tags! Beck with cravat and angel wings! -Įach attempt feels more profound than mere costume play.ĭe Wilde says that’s because Beck’s imagination serves as a sort of navigational system. Really bad political theater.” In the book’s first photograph, Beck faces the stage from the sound booth, wearing a cowboy hat and fanning his spindly fingers across his back pocket.īeck first came to mainstream attention in the mid-‘90s, with jumbled alt-rock oddities like “Loser” and “Where It’s At.” But he’s proved over a fruitful and varied career that The volume stretches across their 16-year friendship, beginning on the 1995 Lollapalooza tour, where a 20-something de Wilde, before she was even serious about photography, was experimenting with “really,
That much, at least, is evident in de Wilde’s portraits of the art-pop chameleon Beck Hansen, many of which are cataloged in her latest book of photographs, “ Beck” Some other way.” While de Wilde’s pictures have a lo-fi feel, they tend to avoid two of the more pronounced signatures of music portraiture: cool detachment or oddball energy. “Because I know they’re going to repeat themselves and I’ll get that moment later, in Someone instead of taking a picture of them, I’m going to have that good conversation,” she says. “If I need to have a good conversation with Robust body of music videos) don’t sport an identifying visual stamp so much as a disquieting intimacy, which she often disrupts with a touch of something stranger. On them,” says the Los Angeles-based photographer, who’s captured more unlikely stars than the Hubble Space Telescope.ĭe Wilde is well known for her portraits of Elliott Smith, the Decemberists, Wilco and others, and for her editorial work everywhere from Spin to Vogue to Paper to The New York Times.
“The people who didn’t love being photographed - word got around that I made it easier Maybe that’s why, for more than a decade, Autumn de Wilde has been one of indie rock’s go-to portraitists. It’s never been truly capable of spectacle. In recent years, the genre has managed to reconcile fame with ruffled discomfort - when Arcade Fire can win a Grammy, these are strange times indeed - but Indie rock has never needed an Annie Leibovitz.
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