Photo courtesy of Justin Hollar.
An old soul in modern times, Justin Hollar always loved music. He embraced The Beatles, The Rolling Stones and Bob Dylan, icons of a time period when the photographer was the artist and the camera his palette. Looking back, we remember of shots of John and Yoko in an Amsterdam Hilton or black and whites of Dylan breaking out the electric guitar at the Newport Folk Festival. You can almost hear the boos emanating from the pictures. Through his viewfinder, a photographer was present yet hidden at the same time, less a voyeur and more a shutterbug historian in an era of burning draft cards, gunshots and experimentation.
So when Hollar found himself holding a camera instead of a guitar, he thought he’d try and rekindle the feel and emotions of a bygone time. The man behind the candid clicks, he spent two months on the road with Benjamin Curtis and Alejandra Deheza of School of Seven Bells. Logging 9,000 miles on a bus and 1,400 hours with SVIIB, Hollar travelled from Bismarck to Santa Barbara with the pair and captured their every moment. As the duo just released their third studio album Ghostory last month, the photographer has finished his own work, the masterfully compiled and edited photobook, SVIIB. With photographs of Curtis playing basketball or Deheza carrying her laundry, the book doesn’t just have your average stage shots. Rather, it contains truthful moments from the artists’ everyday happenings and recalls a period when photos made us fall in love with musicians just as much as their music.
Here are some of our favorite shots from Mr. Hollar:
