Underground venues are a photographer’s nightmare. The light’s always wrong, some amber wash from a single gel, maybe a practical lamp someone dragged in from their living room, and darkness everywhere else. Viracocha is no exception. I’m fumbling with ISO settings, knowing most shots are gonna have grain like sandpaper, trying to find an angle that doesn’t blow out her face or lose her completely to the shadows.
Meklit was shares a place with Nat over on Franconia Street. One of those Bernal Heights houses where the rent was just barely manageable and the walls were thin enough to hear someone working through a melody or a relationship at 2:22 AM. Which means I knew her. Which means I couldn’t photograph her worth a damn.
She’d come to plenty of the Franconia Performance Salons, she’d performed at a couple of them. Those cramped living room shows where everyone sat on the floor and you could hear every breath between notes. Where the distinction between audience and performer dissolved and everyone ended up in the kitchen talking until 3 AM. So by the time I’m trying to shoot her at Viracocha, she’s not some artist I’m documenting, she’s someone I’ve watched work through new material in a room that smelled like Michael’s curry was still warm on the stove.
You’re supposed to have distance. That’s what makes the work honest, you see what’s there, not what you want to be there. But when you’re shooting someone you’ve shared beers with, whose voice you’ve heard through walls at odd hours, someone who’s stood in your friend’s living room and made thirty people forget to breathe… you lose that. You can’t see them objectively. You see the person, not the performer. Or worse, you see both, and you freeze up trying to figure out which one you’re supposed to be capturing.
You’re supposed to stay detached when you’re shooting. Find the frame, wait for the moment, click. But she’s hitting these notes that come up from somewhere deep, singing in Amharic and English like they’re the same language, and suddenly you’re not a photographer anymore, you’re just someone who knows this person, watching them do something extraordinary, feeling proud and useless in equal measure.
The technical problems don’t stop. The stage is barely a stage, more like a designated corner with a mic stand. I’m shooting from too close because there’s nowhere else to stand, trying not to be that asshole photographer blocking everyone’s view. The dynamic range is impossible: her face catches a slash of light, everything else goes black. You either expose for her or you expose for the room. There is no both.
This is what matters: the photos lie. They flatten it. They turn a moment that grabbed you by the throat into a two-dimensional document of inadequate lighting, bad acoustics, and a photographer who couldn’t stay objective. But you shoot anyway, because maybe, just maybe, someone looking at that grainy, underlit image years later will see something. A woman singing in a small San Francisco venue on a Wednesday in December. You had to have been there to know what actually happened. The photos just prove it existed.
