ART BLANCHE: Lost in the Dream
Photographing Adam Granduciel of The War on Drugs was one of Dustin Condren’s favorite type of photoshoots. For it, Dustin visited Adam in Philadelphia for three days, which let the two of them take their time in getting to know each other, hang out, and shoot an album cover.
The War on Drugs – Lost in the Dream (via Dustin Condren)
“The reason I like that sort of set up the most is that there's no pressure to really sort of bang something out really quickly. I can observe -- I can take five photos over the course of an hour and talk a ton and make sure that they're feeling comfortable,” said Dustin.
“He has a big, sort of old crappy apartment in Philadelphia and has a ton of equipment and that's sort of what he just does every day: get up and record. So I basically just looked for opportunities to shoot interesting, moody pictures in his apartment.”
Having shot press photos and album covers for a variety of bands, Dustin’s photographic specialty is portraiture. So, it makes sense that he was there to photograph Adam’s and the rest of the band’s pictures for the record, but this was a new visual direction for The War on Drugs.
“He'd never been on the cover of any of his records before -- he kept a very low profile -- but he felt like this record was something very, very personal to him and I think the label maybe had been telling him that they wanted him to step forward,” Dustin said. “Which I think in the long run turned out to be very good that he did, because it gave the audience something to hold onto. Basically he had recorded the entire record in his home.”
The process, as is common for Dustin’s work, was more collaboration than one-sided. He and Adam would listen to the record and work together to figure out the best approach they could take to developing the visuals.
Adam Granduciel (via Dustin Condren)
“I don't think a lot of people realize that Adam had as specific of a visual -- I don't know -- set of requirements that he wants to meet,” Dustin said. “I think he was very thoughtful about the process -- for me it's really nice to work with someone like that [who] isn't scared of the process.”
On top of his input in their brainstorm sessions, Adam’s fingerprint is all over the record’s cover with his own photography.
“The thing that made it really work, for the cover, was that we had talked a lot about [what] his previous covers were and the Slave Ambient cover, which was the record before, was just a frame of some film that he had shot on tour with his Holga camera,” Dustin said. “It was just this sort of light leak -- blue and red sort of abstract pattern. And he has rolls of this film where he's sort of shot stuff that didn't work, so it's these colors and trippy kind of patterns. So he had the idea that he might want to try with whatever we were shooting to overlay his own sort of abstract colors on top.”
The War on Drugs (via Dustin Condren)
They sent some of Adam’s Holga photos to Secretly Canadian’s in-house designer, Daniel Murphy, to combine on Dustin’s photo of Adam in front of his window, and Dustin sent them back the final, new version, much to everyone’s delight.
“With the title of the record and the feeling the music has, [the cover] wound up being pretty perfect.”
