BOOTSY HOLLER WAS THERE
A CONVERSATION WITH MUSIC PHOTOGRAPHER BOOTSY HOLLER ABOUT HER NEW PHOTOBOOK, MAKiNG iT: AN INTIMATE LOOK AT SEATTLE’S INDIE, ROCK, AND PUNK SCENES
WRITTEN BY MERON MENGHISTAB
Bootsy Holler is the type of photographer that the zeitgeist of image-making relies on. When you close your eyes and remember an album cover while trying to explain your favorite song to a friend, or when you find a flyer tucked away in a jacket you haven't worn in years, the music photographer is the squeaky wheel keeping the medium in perpetual relevance. Contrary to videographers' and influencers' belief, a photograph will always be an access point to nostalgia and awe of what a packed, loud, and sweaty room can do for your emotional stability — and if you disagree, please feel free to email us what you did with that shitty cellphone video you made from GA the last time you were at a show.
When we at CHUM found out Bootsy would be putting out a book about one of the most profoundly energetic and kinetic times in Seattle music history, we had to grab her while she was in town and strike up a conversation about it. I met Bootsy in the lobby of Hotel Andra while the weather outside was as clichéd as you can imagine for Seattle, but in a way, it felt perfect to have the ambiance that defines Seattle surround us as we discussed the music that played its part in this city's legacy.
The following has been edited for length and clarity.
Meron Menghistab: Something I love about your work in this book is you have pictures of Death Cab for Cutie right next to pictures of a band that someone might not necessarily know. I always think about photography as this great equalizer in that sense: Some of the bands will go on to be big names, but there are also smaller names that are just as important.
Bootsy Holler: It’s [all part of the] history. That tiny scene in those tiny clubs. Sometimes there were not that many people in those clubs when we were shooting, but that was my scene, and that’s not how I made money. I was just there. That was my life. Those are my friends. Those are my people.
MM: In the book, you say one of your advantages was that you were part of the scene; you note that respecting people's faces and not feeling invasive is something you took seriously. You write about how you didn’t want to be the guy in the back of the room with a long lens. Can you expand a bit more about that relationship between photographer and musician, and how honoring how they wanted to be presented or seen affected your image making
BH: Being part of the scene — right inside the scene — involved choosing to shoot or not to shoot because it could have been disruptive. A lot of these bands were in spaces where there wasn't even a green room. The Crocodile didn't have a green room. It had a fucking closet. It had a closet. If you walked in there, you'd just be like, Yep, why am I in here?
If I was in a green room, often it was with a band that was from out of town, and if I didn't know them personally, I wasn't wanting to hang out in their space anyways, because they were getting ready for the show. It was more about showing them I was there, and that I’d be shooting. I never wanted to step on any toes or disrupt anybody, or bum them out before they had to go on stage. Often I wasn’t even shooting for a magazine; I’d come as a person out of the scene, shooting for myself, and I’d be on the side of the stage trying to lean on an amp or speaker, trying to be small, or behind something, and not be totally in their faces.
I mean, you can stand right in front of somebody, but you have to feel it out. You have to be super empathic, and read the room and read a scene: Does it feel fine? If nobody’s freaking here, might I use this as an opportunity and shoot some really great photos of these guys? I was always deciding what was appropriate or not, and if I wasn't shooting for a magazine — which a lot of time I wasn't — or for the rags, I just felt like it wasn’t really my place, and I was just shooting for fun anyways, and wasn’t going to be pushy, unless I’d been given the right to, and then I’d go in and ask for it.
At that point, it's like, How do we do this? How do we do it fast? How do I set up in some place that has no place for me to shoot, and respect their time and place and grab something cool? If I did want a shot of people in the bar or people backstage or in the green room, I would often ask, or say, Oh my god, this looks cool, you guys are awesome, I’m gonna shoot. I would present that I was going to be doing this, because often I was on a really wide lens, so I was literally sitting across the table from somebody. Or a lot of times I had a point-and-shoot on me, and it was just like fucking around, shooting your friends, and taking selfies before selfies were a thing.
MM: You write in the book about teaching yourself lab work and black-and-white film developing because it’s cheaper, which is still true today. And you sometimes name the cameras you were using for certain photos. You also take a moment in the book to talk about your flash-drag approach. Being in these music spaces, where you were originally there just for the music and the people, was there a moment where you felt like it really became a playground for your photography? How did the relationship with those mediums change over time?
BH: I started with no flash. I was like, You're not gonna use a flash. We're in these dark clubs. It's obnoxious. It's in their face. If I were on stage, I would hate it. For me, shooting is emotional, and I want people to feel emotions, and I felt that by not using a flash, I wasn't altering the location and the experience of the room. But then on film, you're getting movement: Things are blurry, things are weird.
“Having not a lot of choices with equipment really pushes you to have a style.”
At some point, you know, I decided that if I put the flash on, it would help me with shooting for the rags, because they're black and white newspapers, and they really like that contrasty stuff. And I said, Okay, well, if I'm gonna start shooting with a flash, I need to teach myself. When I get a camera, I go through the whole menu, and so that's what I did with the flash. Taking the flash out to shoot live and experiment live — when you do that, you don't know what you're getting, especially if you're shooting film. And you want to shoot on the darker side, because you don't want to lose anything. When you're using the flash and it's wide open and you're popping multiple times, it's experimental, and you come home and you’ll have one really cool shot.
MM: And that's the thrill of it, though, right? To me, that's why we're addicted to this.
BH: If I hadn’t messed around, I would have never gotten the one cool shot. And it’s fine that the rest are just okay. It was a big shift for me to feel okay about shooting flash in a venue. And I think when you're not doing a job for somebody, fucking around is the best thing to do, because then if you then do a job, you know how to do that.
MM: That’s so important: You have to be making images for yourself, or else you’re just going to keep making things that you think people want to see, versus you imposing your ideas onto your own style.
BH: There's nothing more important for any artist than having your own style. And I mean, the book is all over the place, because I was just playing so much. But when you see my portraiture, it's very specific. And when you see all the work I shot on the old Canon AE-1 50-millimeter — that's all I had — it's very consistent, and it's only the crazy experimental stuff that's a little more wild and all over the place. Having not a lot of choices with equipment really pushes you to have a style. And one of my other things that pushed my style, besides only having specific lenses, was, before I had flash, I always used daylight and big windows and blew out behind people and pushed the lens as far as I could, to get all the fallout that I wanted, and things like that.
At MOPOP’s opening — which used to be the Experience Music Project — [there was] a row of men with big lenses, big-ass lenses, probably shooting a tight headshot of some musician. And then there was me on a wide lens, on my Prime 24-millimeter, which was probably on my Canon 5D, and then there was Henry Diltz with three black-and-white film cameras. I'm the only woman, he's the only older guy, and the rest are all these big-cock lenses. Guess what: We’re getting something different than those guys. I'm happy about that. I don't want to shoot what they’re shooting.
MM: This book is tied to a very specific point in time. What encouraged you to make it now, digging through 15 years of your archive?
BH: I have this great group of women photographers in LA — almost like a co-op photo group, we do gallery shows together — and in 2015, or 2016, we were talking about legacy. And we were talking about how books are getting easier and easier to make, and how none of your work is worth anything if it's on a hard drive or in a binder. And there’s the whole concept of losing the tangible photograph: These kids shoot all digital and it's all on their phone, and it just disappears, and there's going to be a huge gap of history that gets lost because of it. And so I was like, Wow, you know, legacy. I do have a son. He's almost 16. And I was like, I don't want to leave this world and have someone come into my studio and throw all this shit away.
And, I thought, you know, getting everything into books, no matter what, even if it's a portfolio or a handmade book, [my son] would have a tangible object, and he can walk away and have his mother's work. Making this book, it was like, Wow, I have 15 years of work that's never really been seen. So I really wanted to make something cool, that's a legacy. I had to decide on the story I’d tell, because I’m not relying on one band or one famous musician. That involved getting all my work into books, which was in huge three-inch binders up in my cabinet sitting there. We’re talking boxes of three-inch-thick binders full of negatives. I don't even think I shot as much as I could have, because I was poor.
MM: Self-editing, almost.
BH: Yeah, yeah. So if I went out to see a band, I would open the fridge and be like, Okay, I wasn't gonna shoot slide film, but I guess I am. Or, I'm gonna bring the Rollei with a roll of 400, and I'll push it a stop. And my favorite was Fuji 1600, and then I'd push it to 32 and just really let the grain come out. It was a very warm film. I really loved all the Fujifilms, even for portraiture.
MM: You know, it's so easy to look now at who “made it,” and who didn’t. At the time, was there anything or anybody where you could just tell the weight of this era of sound? When you’re in it, does anyone even know the significance of what’s happening?
BH: So I would say the biggest moment was of going like, Oh, wow, I'm in something different was, I was in New York, and Kill Rock Stars was doing cool dope stuff. Modest Mouse was in Seattle, blowing up here in the Northwest. And I can't remember if I was at a cafe, I was probably in the East Village or something — and, you know, everybody in New York thinks they're so cool, right, especially down in the East Village — and I'm standing, and these two girls are in line, and they think they're so fucking cool, and they're talking about Modest Mouse. And like, for them, it had just reached New York, and I was just smiling inside, being like, Oh, you guys think you're so cool, and they're already passé in Seattle. But that was a really key moment.
And that's what's amazing about the music. For background, there’s the story of grunge: Everybody's just in their basement or garage making music because it's raining out and it's dark and moody and dirty or grungy and and you're not being really influenced by anything outside of the area as much, because you're insulated with your friends, and you're just doing what feels right, because there's no pressure to create something that you actually think is going to go anywhere, because you don't think you're going to go anywhere, because you're in the fucking basement making making weird noises on your guitar.
And so I do think that post-grunge, what happened was, grunge brought all these people to look at Seattle, all these kids all over the United States and Europe. They all were like, Whoa, what's this phenomenon that's happening? And then they all graduated from high school or college — or chose to come out here and go to college — to be in that scene. I mean, there are so many people that literally came out because of what was happening here, and they were younger. And all those kids grew up post-grunge, doing whatever they wanted to do, they were trying to get seen, and they wanted to be playing in a club where maybe some [record] guy would happen to be there.
“There's no pressure to create something that you actually think is going to go anywhere, because you don't think you're going to go anywhere.”
I think that it was this weird influx of all these kids that are weirdos, that are musicians, that are, you know, you know, came out here to do something weird and different, just like they saw in Nirvana. But I think that also, like, there was that moment after the Big Three when you think of like, Pearl Jam, Soundgarden, and, not Nirvana, but Alice in Chains — and also Mudhoney — they were already doing that thing, and that was very different from the pop sounds of, like the Posies or something. And you know, when Nirvana blew up, they were, in a way, an amalgamation of pop and grunge and rock and punk and, you know, it was a different thing. For me, as a young person in my 20s, I definitely was like, This is different. I've never heard anything like this. It's, it's, it's not rock, yeah, it's not pop. It was its own thing in between. And you really could feel something different going on there with that. And then, when Nirvana exploded, everything went off the charts. But there was, you know, that ramping up of everything: I mean, Kurt was down in Olympia, and these guys were all in Seattle, building their bands up through the ’80s.
MM: Definitely. Prior to social media, most bands building these cultures had so much music and the fan base was already there before it could get out.
BH: Yeah, a slow build.
In the beginning, when I was shooting, there were no medium-sized venues in town. So Nirvana went from playing the Crocodile to — oh shit — playing at the UW, which was a big-venue event with probably 1,000 kids, and then I saw them play at Key Arena, and there were three guys on this huge stage, no lights, no ambiance, and nobody in any seats; the floor was half-full. That was what they had to do, because there was no medium-sized venue for them. So the first time I saw them, it would have been maybe late ’92, maybe ’93, and I went with my boyfriend at the time, and we had a fan-zine, and I wrote an article about watching them and how small on the stage they were. It was weird.
MM: I can't imagine what it’s like to see bands you love, see them break up right before they could have—
BH: Yeah, what makes somebody make it or not? Why did some of these people who were amazing artists not make it and really should have? Like Carrie Akre, I go back to Carrie from Hammerbox all the time, and I worked with Carrie a ton, and she really trusted me, and she had a vision. Being in all these bands with guys, you know, she was doing something different. I don't know what fell apart for them. “Making it” is a phrase that's used all the time in music. What else do you name this book? MAKiNG iT was really the only thing I could think of calling it.
All images are excerpts from the book MAKiNG iT by Bootsy Holler, available now.
Bootsy Holler photographed by Meron Menghistab