I photograph the crowd, not the band

Every photographer in the pit is taking the same four pictures. Trey mid-lean. Page over the Rhodes. Mike backlit. Fish, blurry, always blurry.

So I turned around.

What you get, if you shoot the audience during a long one, is a hundred people making a face they would never let you photograph on purpose. Total unguarded concentration. It looks like prayer and it looks like grief and mostly it looks like people listening harder than they listen to anything else in their lives.

Alpine, that July, during a version everyone has since agreed was Something — I got a frame of a man in his sixties with his hand flat on his own chest, eyes shut, absolutely wrecked. I found him on a message board a year later and sent him the print. He wrote back: "that was three weeks after my brother died."

I don't shoot the band.