Neighbor 2: Re-Emergence (2020-2022)
For the past 18 months I had been knee deep in a project photographing the band Neighbor during their Tuesday night residency at a small Somerville music club, Thunder Road. Though I was only shooting there once a week, the project was taking up a lot of my time and psychic energy, and I was heavily immersed in the images I was making of a music community that I had become an intergral part of.
After a year and a half into their residency, Neighbor’s playing was becoming extremely tight, their writing output prolific, and the crowd sizes were growing as word spread. Like the band and their fans (Neighbors), I was excited to see where this musical journey was headed. And then, just like that, the music and my photo project came to a crashing halt, as the Covid Pandemic took over our lives in March of 2020.
Isolated in a pod at home with my partner Kathy, I spent my days working on the computer, and taking long walks in the woods. The sadness I felt for the premature ending of my Tuesday night photo project was immense, and when I heard the news that Thunder Road was permanently shutting down, I knew that my Neighbor project was over. But deep down I wasn't ready for the project to end, and Neighbor obviously was feeling the same way in regards to playing music together.
A number of weeks after the Pandemic shut everything down, I found myself shooting a few images off of my computer screen of the live lockdown performances that each band member was broadcasting separately from the safety of their own homes. A month later I continued to photograph the screen as the band played their first song together, with all four members joining in from their separate locations. But lockdown performances were not monetarily or creatively sustainable, and the music community was desperate to begin playing live again. So three months after the shutdown, with warm weather approaching, socially distanced outdoor and drive-in shows began to get scheduled.
On June 25, 2020, double masked and extremely paranoid about being exposed to the deadly virus, I made my way to Neighbor's first live show, a socially distanced, drive-in concert at Tupelo Drive-In located in Derry, New Hampshire. It was a disconcerting and scary, yet exhilarating experience, to be back photographing a live music scene, but this time instead of it taking place on a Tuesday night in a small club, it was outside during the onslaught of a dangerous virus that could not be seen, even in the sunlight of an afternoon drive-in show.
In the months that followed I began traveling to other Neighbor outdoor shows, without really having a concept of how I was going to use the images. But I knew I needed to continue to photograph. For the first time since the start of the Pandemic, I was willing to step outside of my comfort zone and photograph once again in public, a huge step forward for me at the time. But things had changed. The joy, ease and intimacy I had felt while photographing at Thunder Road was now being replaced by the constant fear of getting sick, and I found myself keeping my distance from my fellow Neighbors as much as possible; at times photographing them with a long lens when in the past I may have moved in closer and shot them with a wide-angle. I ended up photographing five outdoor, socially distanced Neighbor shows in 2020 before cold weather put an end to the outdoor season, the last being a sub-freezing Halloween extravaganza where Neighbor turned themselves into the Neighbor 9 by adding both horns and backup female singers. Afterwards we all drove home, to isolate and hibernate as winter approached.
While many bands decided to wait out the pandemic Neighbor used the opportunity to continue to move forward. They began a twice-monthy residency that they named Live from Planet Silver, a series of audience-less streams at a new, still under construction Soundcheck Studios, which would become Neighbor’s home base. When the streams ended five months later, Neighbor began touring nationally. I did not follow them to most of the shows, limiting my attendance to just a handful within driving distance of my home. As the Pandemic shifted, and vaccinations started to become available, I noticed far fewer masks at each subsequent show, and people began to drop their guard, even though the Pandemic had not abated. And the band continued to play on.
I was still unsure if the new photographs I was making would lead to any type of meaningful project, but as the arc of the Pandemic shifted, and people began to feel safer and more willing to interact with one another, an idea in question form began to germinate in my mind…Could I possibly assemble the photographs in a way that tells the story of a deadly pandemic's cycle, as seen through the lens of how a band and their fanbase navigate it through their shared musical experience? And I began to think about the photographs with this concept in mind. For the project’s ending I thought I needed to photograph a show where the images could illustrate a return to normalcy, and a definitive end to the Pandemic; maybe an indoor, maskless show, with the kind of energy and intimacy that existed prior to the arrival of covid? But the Pandemic was not over, no matter how much we all wanted it to be, and despite how I might envision the end of the project, I couldn’t help thinking that in the ever-changing covid environment we were living in, the perfect show for my ending was probably not going to happen anytime soon.
But then, on June 19, 2021, at Soundcheck Studios, an ending to the project spontaneously arrived. After the first set of Neighbor’s covid-safe parking-lot show, it began to rain. The outdoor show could no longer continue, so during intermission a snap decision was made to move indoors for the second set. With the help, sweat and muscle of the fans, drum-kits, amps, guitars, lighting gear, and other equipment were moved from the parking lot into the still-under-construction, interior space of Soundcheck Studios. The anticipation in the room was electric as the band took the stage, and the maskless crowd went wild, jammed shoulder to shoulder as in those pre-pandemic, Thunder Road days. Yet with the onset of this first non-masked, shoulder to shoulder inside show in almost two years, and the excitement and joy surrounding me, I seemed the only one saddened by what was taking place, thinking that at that moment I was capturing the final chapter of my three-year photographic journey, and the end of my emersion in the Neighbor scene was at hand. Or at least that’s what I thought at the time......
But whether the project was actually over yet or not, I did know one thing. Not only had I fulfilled my assignment of documenting a band and their fanbase navigating, and successfully re-emerging after a deadly pandemic, but I had also experienced my own re-emergence as a photographer, one where I could begin to move forward into a post-Covid world.
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