Read an Excerpt

I Hope You Are All Happy Now

St. Martin's Press

NEVER MIND THE FORMULA

With his camera, Nick Zinner has been noting observations of an unusual life. This book assembles his offhand photographs by allowing them to refer to one another in the same way Zinner's camera refers to the world he's moving through. It's a twenty-first century rock 'n' roll world, but the cumulative affect isn't only that. These are images of circumstance, each page becoming its own configuration.

For at least the past decade I've been drawn to a trend in photography that first emerged in a Japanese magazine called Out of Photographers. Its pages were filled only with snapshots taken by Japanese teenagers — mundane, silly, sad, stupid, beautiful artifacts of daily teenage life. (The true godfather of all this is most likely the Japanese photographer Nobuyoshi Araki, one of my very favorites, whose pseudo- amateur black-and-white images of personal hardcore sex interspersed with photos of deserted Tokyo back streets, fluorescent vending machines, details of hotel-room floors with tossed-off clothing, telephone cords, and ashtrays have elevated photography to an ethereal new dimension.)

I've been happy to find Nick's photos following an adjacent trajectory, and blurring similar lines in the process. On one hand, this book can be looked at as cultural anthropology (clothes, hairstyles, tattoos, attitude, food, decor, incidental furniture, architecture, and infrastructure). For me, though, it's more of a photo diary, really — but one that chooses not to make any distinction between what's dramatic and what's mundane.

Sometimes Zinner seems drawn to colors and shapes, or just haphazard compositions. At other times he finds in those within view human fragility, or maybe fatigue, or ecstasy, or boredom.

His photos of fans taken from the stage are striking in their near-abstract mix of artificial light and human bodies. Often faces are distinct, each one a kind of micro-portrait of the spirit of rock 'n' roll (or expression in general). From the stage, the lens of Zinner's camera becomes a mirror, and this time he blurs the line between subject and object, between fan and performer, between perceiver and perceived.

Then there are the personal artifacts, the details — airplanes and sky, hotel rooms and toilets, torn stockings, bruises, buses, side streets, televisions ... And the cool thing is he does all of this without any intention of the "photo as metaphor" or "image as aphorism" kind of shit. These images truly feel unconsciously offhand.

One last thing about this book: although it also deftly sidesteps the cliches of the "rock 'n' roll lifestyle" bullshit, there is a very strong, almost tangible energy inside these images — a sincere "lust for life" (respect to Iggy). And finding energy in stillness, and poetry in the smaller details of daily life (minus the cliches), is a rare and beautiful quality. Never mind the formula — here's I Hope You Are All Happy Now.

— Jim Jarmusch

New York, January 2005

---

Excerpted from I Hope You Are All Happy Now by Nicholas Zinner. Copyright © 2005 Nicholas Zinner. Excerpted by permission of St. Martin's Press.
All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
Excerpts are provided by Dial-A-Book Inc. solely for the personal use of visitors to this web site.

---