What seems like yesterday, but is actually last November, I photographed Thomas Dolby at Real World where he was working on material for ‘A Map of the Floating City’ - his first album in two decades, available from today on the B&W Society of Sound.
Thomas Dolby was an indelible part of the electronic music landscape on both sides of the Atlantic in the 80s. The Zelig of synthpop, he was seemingly there or thereabouts at all points of that crucial decade. He enjoyed huge solo success with She Blinded Me With Science and Hyperactive!, composed and performed on hits for everyone from AOR giants Foreigner to none-more-quirky new wave girl Lene Lovich, produced three superlative albums for Prefab Sprout, and even co-wrote the much-sampled early rap classic Magic’s Wand by Whodini.
Peter Gabriel’s New Blood project has been absorbing a lot of time over the past few weeks and months - indeed it’s very much ongoing with an urgent need to get several video projects off my computer and into the world.
Some of the photography has already escaped from my machine and is appearing in various promotional contexts, such as in this poster Marc Bessant put together for the 3D New Blood film screenings - it’s a mix of shots, but calls the lovely Canon 300mm F2.8 lens into play, which is always a beautiful thing to look through.
New Blood’s been a groundbreaking project for many of us involved in it’s making. For me it’s unusual in that a large number of photographs are going to find themselves breaking free of the screen and entering the physical world with the Deluxe Edition housing versions of the album and film in a 60 page book of photographs I took during the recording sessions at Air Lyndhurst and the concerts at Hammersmith Apollo. I’ve also been working on the designs for the 3D Blu-ray interface,perhaps the first piece of what I was going to call ‘genuine’ 3D to make it into production since a Masters in 3D graphics drew me to Real World many moons ago. It all get’s a bit abstract if I try to explain what I mean by ‘genuine’ because it’s certainly not real, but with the right glasses on it does feel like you can put your hand behind it and like the film, it breaks free of the screen. The effect is quite subtle on the menus because primarily they have to function as an interface and there is already a lot of implied motion in play as I’ve used a set of photographs I took at the shows that utilise a lot of camera and lens movement to abstract the experience.
I’ll post some examples as the wraps begin to come off the project, for the moment it’s all just on pre-order, although there are various cinema screenings for the 3D film cropping up.
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