The adventures and various works of a photographer, road tripper, former patron of the local arts, aspiring app developer, and late night coffee drinker and conversationalist.
When it comes to my most significant artistic endeavors, I haven't always operated alone. About a decade and a half ago, I was part of a collaborative project at Bill's Records on South Lamar (now Botham Jean Blvd.) with my longtime friend and occasional co-conspirator Alex Pogosov. The project was a reincarnation of an earlier open mic which ran from 2002-2006 at Bill's old location off Spring Valley in far north Dallas. The Lost Art Open Mic, as this later enterprise came to be known, began in May 2010 and ran until early June 2011, and has been chronicled on this site since some of its earliest days. Looking back at all the open mic nights we conducted, there are some that stand out as great successes, and others that I don't recall quite so fondly. Generally those not so fond remembrances are related to instances of low attendance or lackluster performances (or, in two cases, because I felt our event was hijacked). But there's one night in particular that I have largely avoided facing for a long time, one I've always been loath to revisit and hesitant to talk much about. And it isn't because no one showed up or because we had a uniquely terrible performer appear who tortured our ears with a blistering sonic assault. It's a night that became stigmatized in my memory due to the series of events that followed it and the impact they had on one of the primary contributors to our scene. And I'm finally going to talk about it here.
By early 2014, I'd been photographing live performances for a full seven years. Deep Ellum was "coming back," on the upswing again following a years' long period of decline. I was back where I had begun in terms of the types of venues and musical genres I was shooting, but my skill level had improved dramatically compared to the early days. The two years from 2014-2016 heralded the end of my regular activity in the scene, and a period during which I captured many of what I consider my best ever shots. The plug had been pulled on the Lost Art Open Mic in 2011, and after having largely turned my back on the spoken word scene by this time, my non-travel photography was once again singularly focused on live music. And, by and large, the live music was centered around a handful of bands with whom I had personal relationships. The bands were familiar, as were most of the venues by this time. But despite this, the act of shooting them with my camera often remained an adventure.
Rail Club, November 2013. Photo courtesy Metal Mina Pics.
Rail Club, November 2013. Photo courtesy Metal Mina Pics.
I spent about nine years as a photographer documenting bands in the Dallas-Fort Worth music scene. That journey was a starting point for my interest in local music history, and having a place to showcase my photos from that experience was a prime factor in my decision to establish this website in January 2008. This series tells the story of that journey.
Not counting open mic performances, I only attended 42 shows in 2010, down dramatically from my peak of 76 in 2008. My responsibilities with the Lost Art Open Mic were a factor in this, but they weren't the whole story. Over time, I had shifted my focus to shows featuring bands and performers with whom I had forged personal relationships. This would become more and more the norm for me in the months and years ahead, with exceptions becoming increasingly rare and eventually almost nonexistent. The closure of the Skillman Street Pub in 2011 played no role in this recalibration, as I had long since ceased to regularly frequent the venue by the time of its demise. Rather, I had reached the point of burn out with the parade of cookie monster metal bands and dollar store Pantera knockoffs which seemed to make up the bulk of its nightly offerings. The way forward – for a while, at least – was in the direction of smaller, more intimate settings with increasingly limited outings to the bigger clubs.
A little over fifteen years ago, I produced and released a compilation of recordings from Alex Pogosov's and my open mic at Bill's Records. This CD, ultimately numbering around 200-250 copies, was conceived as a means of promoting the weekly gathering at Bill's and featured performances by a number of our regulars up to that point in time. More than a decade and a half later, I've had that promotional album cut to vinyl, fulfilling a long harbored fantasy dating all the way back to childhood. I'm just barely old enough to (dimly) remember actual records being played on the radio, and when I was three and four years old I wanted to make one of my own. Today's manufacturing on demand services have now made that possible.
The Lost Art showrunners in 2010. Photo by Lilly Penhall.
