Kristian Hoffman and Lance Loud met in high school back in the early ’70s in Santa Barbara, Calif. After starring in PBS cinéma-vérité documentary An American Family, they formed the Mumps, moved to New York and shared Max’s and CBGB stages with all the legends of the punk/new-wave explosion of 1976: Television, the Ramones, Talking Heads and Blondie. Hoffman and Loud also had front-row seats for the Mercer Arts Center incubation of the New York Dolls, before that. In our book, that grants you unlimited license to open the floodgates. Fop (Kayo), Hoffman’s latest solo album, is an ornate masterpiece of baroque pop, well worth your attention. Hoffman will be guest editing magnetmagazine.com all week. Read our new Q&A with him.
Hoffman: I was very lucky to meet the masterful Mr. Schenck when he was standing in front of me in line at some film-developing office back in the ’80s. We had both been working on what the contemporary culture chose to charitably call a “performance piece” with the late, lamented and beloved Donald Krieger, so I had the chance to introduce myself with the line that is bereft of all imagination and charm: “Love your work!” Lucky for me, the ebullient master forgave me, and we have since become fast friends, and even as he has spiraled ever higher into the rarified Elysium reserved for only the finest of art photographers, he has maintained that friendship and regularly supplied any portraits I need for my CDs, as well as a trove of wonderful prints. He has also done loads of fantastic portraits of my friends Ann Magnuson and Abby Travis, and when I introduced him to my friends Sparks and the Cramps, he took what are some of their most memorable pictures. All around great guy!
But it is his art photography that most astounds, grips, inspires and transports. Dreamscapes of shadowy noir implication, with boundless depths of emotional resonance, they are like paintings, only performed by séance and ouija—a message from a spirit world at once chillingly close and still unknowable to any vessel but the soul.
A portrait he did of me after the jump.
