As 2011 comes to an end, we are taking a look back at some of our favorite posts of the year by our guest editors.
British trio White Lies—guitarist/vocalist Harry McVeigh, bassist Charles Cave and drummer Jack Lawrence-Brown—just released Ritual (Geffen/Fiction), which follows up To Lose My Life…, the band’s commercially successful 2009 debut. The 10-track sophomore LP was co-produced by Alan Moulder (Depeche Mode, Killers) and was written over a five-week period when White Lies wasn’t crisscrossing the globe in support of its first album. Though McVeigh, Cave and Lawrence-Brown are all barely old enough to drink legally in the U.S., the threesome has been playing together as a band since their mid-teens, first as Fear Of Flying, which released two singles produced by Stephen Street (Smiths, Blur), and then under the White Lies moniker. The trio will be guest editing magnetmagazine.com all week. Read our brand new Q&A with them.
Lawrence-Brown: Now, every person in the whole world likes to take pictures. At a party, in a new city, on a plane, of your loved ones, of your super cute new puppy. The age of camera phone has allowed everyone the opportunity to be a photographer all of the time, which is a fantastic thing. However, the photography I prefer to talk about is that which predates the year 1995, when the first consumer digital cameras began to appear. I am a massive fan of everything about film photography. I love the process more than anything though. The idea that when you load your carefully selected film into your carefully selected camera, you are going to need to find 36 separate events or situations or locations that will excite you or interest you enough to stop … Check the light levels … Check your aperture and your exposure length … Frame and focus … Then release the shutter and turn the crank to wind the film to begin the process all over again. That is before you even get to the part where you go to the photography lab, hand over your film, hand over your hard-earned money. And wait. And wait some more. And then pick up your negatives, hurry home and scan them all in. I sometimes forget where my pictures were taken, such is the length of time between clicking the shutter and seeing the image, but I am always reassured by the knowledge that I was confident enough to commit it to film, so it has to have meant something to me at some point. My favorite camera that I own is a beautiful old Rolleiflex from the ’60s. And currently I am a fan of architectural photography, especially that of Hélène Binet. Anyone who wants to hear someone talk about photography in a much more eloquent manner than myself should read Camera Lucida by Roland Barthes.
Video after the jump.
