Case Study - Karen McBride
Manchester-based Karen McBride shoots mainly up-and-coming young bands, although her biggest commission to date is following Robbie Williams on tour for sponsors T-Mobile.
"When I started my career it was because my brother was in a band," she relates. "I was into photography anyway, but didn't know where I wanted to go with it, apart from that I knew I didn't want to do weddings or family portraits. I started with dark, urban landscape stuff and my brother liked it and asked if I would do his pictures. Somebody else saw them and liked them and I built it up from there."
The Robbie Williams commission came about as a result of T-Mobile's PR people finding McBride's website while looking for music photographers.
"They liked the Pete Doherty shot I'd taken at Glastonbury," she says, "and the next thing I knew I was on the tour.
I knew that it would be a good experience, and it was really tiring in terms of the travelling, but once you get used to that you click into work mode and just do it. I covered 11 cities over the course of four months, with two or three days out at each time. That introduced me to the Robbie Williams camp, who love the work. You never know where that's going to lead," she says, adding she's also doing the official pictures for Channel 4's resurrection of 80s music show The Tube. But, like many who seem to be doing well for themselves now, McBride has paid her dues with a career stretching back 20 years. "It's only in recent years that record labels have started paying interest to what I'm doing. I've perhaps made it more difficult by being based in Manchester rather than London, but I was always determined to make it happen here. Had I not put in all those years of hard work supporting local music, then I wouldn't be getting to do the stuff I'm doing now. I've got a solid platform, but it has taken a long time to build."
McBride believes that the key to approaching music photography is keeping an open mind.
"With live concerts you can break the rules, because how it feels is more important than perfection," she says. "I've always gone with my feelings, and I think that comes through in the pictures.
"I work very closely with bands. What they want, and what the NME want are two very different things. A band may want all of the dark blurry, Pennie Smith-esque stuff, whereas a magazine will want something a bit clearer, sharper and static."
To see Contact details go to the Directory
