When the photographer Roger Ballen’s video for “I Fink U Freeky,” by Die Antwoord, came out earlier this month, I watched it over and over again, amazed by how it brought his still images to life while also conveying the personality of the band. It got me thinking about other video collaborations between photographers and musicians, some of them surprising, others made by photographers who are prolific in the form. Here’s a selection of ten, all made by directors with large bodies of photographic work, along with comments from most of the artists.
- Die Antwoord, “I Fink U Freeky,” directed by Roger Ballen and Ninja.
Ballen told me that he’s known the band members Ninja and Yo-Landi for years, and that he’s long wanted to make a video for them. “Unfortunately, they were living in Cape Town and I in Johannesburg, and as a result the logistics never seemed to have worked out,” he said. On New Year’s Eve, though, he took a photograph of Die Antwoord for the New York Times Magazine, and they decided to finally make it happen. Two weeks later, the video for “I Fink U Freeky” was in the can. “We started with my photographs for ideas and then mimicked them in the sets,” Ballen told me. “Most of the sets started with almost a ‘Roger Ballen still life’ and then expanded on the particular theme cinematically. In many aspects, a great work of cinema contains an abundance of powerful still images.”
- R.E.M., “The One I Love,” directed by Robert Longo.
“With this video, I wanted to make pictures that looked like the music,” Longo told me. “There are no actors, just friends and family of the band. I went down to Athens, Georgia, to film it. They didn’t want to lip sync, which was fine with me, but other than that they really gave me free reign with the project. It all came about because Michael Stipe knew my art, and had seen the other videos I’d done for Golden Palominos (“Boy [Go]”) and New Order (“Bizarre Love Triangle”). We became friends, and he asked me to do the project with him.”
- PJ Harvey, “Hanging in The Wire,” directed by Seamus Murphy.
Murphy directed and shot films for each of the songs on Harvey’s recent album “Let England Shake”; there’s now a DVD with all twelve films. “Polly had seen an exhibition of my Afghan work in London and got in touch,” Murphy told me. “She sent me a demo of the album, stripped down, acoustic, raw, and very beautiful.” He shot some portraits of Harvey, then left again for Afghanistan, where he experimented with shooting video with the compact Canon 5D Mark II camera. When he told her about that work, she asked him to make films for her songs.
“The rest was left up to me,” he said. “It helped me enormously that I was able to go off on my own and make these films, without a crew or other people. That would have been interesting—and at times, easier—but it would have been a different result. Some of the strangeness comes from being alone. Lost and lonely, and trying out ideas just to keep sane.” I asked Murphy how his still photography translated into these videos. “In still images, at least for me, it’s the moment, the timeless infinity of that moment,” he told me. “In moving images you have other elements to consider and exploit: movement, sound, sequencing. But it’s all photography.”
- New Order, “Blue Monday 1988,” directed by William Wegman.
“Michael Shamberg, who I knew from the Kitchen, invited Robert Breer and myself to collaborate with New Order on ‘Blue Monday,’ ” Wegman told me. “Robert was to use his film-animation techniques on video images I shot with the group. I had just started working with my dog Fay, who, compared to my previous Weimaraner, Man Ray, was strangely very shy and vulnerable in spite of her powerful presence.” But she was obsessed with the tennis ball, Wegman notes in a blog post about the video. “Thinking back, the mid-eighties were a transitional and odd period for me,” he said. “The time was marked by several collaborations with other artists and filmmakers, like Mike Smith and Betsy Conners.”
- Britney Spears, “Everytime,” directed by David LaChapelle.
“In 2004, I wanted to make a video that was a portrait of the other side of fame—the horror-show side—and Britney wanted to do the same thing,” LaChapelle told me. “This was prior to her marriage, children, divorce, and the media tabloid feeding frenzy that followed. We thought the video should end with her drowning in a bathtub, and then a birth in the hospital to signify being reborn or transformed. But the record company didn’t want her to ‘die’ in the video, so we made it a ‘dream’ sequence, and she rises out of the water at the end smiling.” I asked LaChapelle about the relationship between his photography and music videos. “My photography is usually narrative and conceptual, so the transition from stills to film comes somewhat easily for me,” he told me. “I enjoy the variety and challenges that different mediums present.”
LaChapelle’s current solo show, “Earth Laughs in Flowers,” is on view at Fred Torres Collaborations through March 24th.
- Spank Rock, “Car Song,” directed by Luis Gispert.
“Spank Rock saw my film ‘Smother’ at Art Basel and connected with the imagery I was working with,” Gispert told me. “Around the same time, not knowing he had seen my film, I had seen Spank Rock preform in New York and had become a fan. We had not met yet. Our mutual friend Al Moran from OHWOW gallery made the introduction. After our first meeting it became clear a collaboration was fated.” I asked Gispert, who works in many mediums, about making a music video in relation to photography. “I consider myself a sculptor who cheats with photography and film on occasion,” he told me. “The music-video genre is new to me. Historically it has served as a conduit for an artist to delve outside of the fine-art context. It was challenging and exhilarating to work with a form that has a broad audience.”
- LCD Soundsystem, “Someone Great,” directed by Doug Aitken.
The collaboration between Doug Aitken and LCD Soundsystem’s James Murphy goes both ways: Aitken, whose work includes photography, sculpture, installation, and video, directed “Someone Great” in 2007, and Murphy contributed to Aitken’s recent work “Song 1,” which can be seen at the Hirshhorn Museum through May 13th.
- Spoek Mathambo, “Control,” directed by Pieter Hugo and Michael Cleary.
“Spoek used one of my images for a mix tape without asking my permission,” Hugo told me. “I phoned him up to berate him—turned out he was recording a new album around the corner from my studio. He came to the studio to discuss our dilemma, and by the time he left I agreed to do music video for him. He’s a super sweet talker.” I asked Hugo about his experience of making a music video in relation to his photography. “I split the responsibilities of directing with Michael Cleary, which made everything considerably easier,” he told me. “I found the entire process much less painful than working on a still shoot. Probably because I don’t have any emotional investment or attachment to the medium. Music videos are so ephemeral. I certainly didn’t lose any sleep over the shoot. It was frivolous and fun.”
- R.E.M., “Überlin,” directed by Sam Taylor-Wood.
“I don’t like making music videos per se, but I don’t feel that any videos that I’ve made have been ‘music-video-like,’ ” Taylor-Wood told me. “I tend to see them as a scene from a film. I don’t really differentiate music videos from the films that I’ve made—it’s just that music videos are much quicker!” This video stars Taylor-Wood’s husband, Aaron Johnson, who also played the young John Lennon in Taylor-Wood’s first feature film, “Nowhere Boy,” from 2009.
- Nirvana, “Heart Shaped Box,” directed by Anton Corbijn.
“I worked for two days in Seattle with Nirvana as a photographer in August, 1993,” Corbijn told me. “Afterwards Kurt told me he was interested to see my Echo & the Bunnymen videos, as Courtney had told him about these. So those were duly sent off, and a few weeks later I received a fax from Kurt. He had written a very detailed script for the song ‘Heart Shaped Box,’ and drew the set idea as well. It was extremely precise and detailed. I had never met a musician who was able to visualise his own music so well. In any case, my videos tend to be made from my ideas, based on the music. Kurt had sent me a script that became ninety per cent of the video. I added some stuff (the big woman ‘mother earth,’ the road through the poppies, the fake birds, fake butterflies, etc.), but this was very much Kurt’s video. He wanted the film to be shot in Technicolor, but that was not possible, so we shot in color, then transferred to black-and-white and then hand-tinted every single frame—a process that took weeks, but it made the video look very up whilst the imagery was really dark. Clever, in retrospect, as MTV never asked for any changes. Kurt asked me again for the next video, ‘Pennyroyal Tea,’ but I felt that I couldn’t top the ‘Heart Shaped Box’ video and turned it down. He then said without me he would never make another video, and unfortunately he never did.”
