“There’s always the chance of failure. But I’ve also learned that the closer you are to the edge, the closer you are to creating something special. I always remind myself, ‘Push yourself to the point where you feel uncomfortable, and then go just a little bit further and see where that takes you.'”
These are a few of the words written by David McClister in the introduction to his new photo book, All Together Now: 25 Years of Photographing American Music. Beyond a single page introduction by McClister, and a short foreword composed by author and art director William U. Eiland, All Together Now contains just under 300 pages of McClister’s photographs of musicians in and around the studio, as well as environmental portraits.
Many of McClister’s photos strike a chord of familiarity, which shouldn’t come as a surprise as his list of publications shot for includes Billboard, Rolling Stone, Men’s Journal, Southern Living, GQ, Newsweek, as well as album artwork and publicity photos for a number of well known performers and recording artists.
Throughout All Together Now, musicians like Dolly Parton, Taylor Swift, Kendrick Lamar, Elvis Costello, Willie Nelson, A$AP Rocky, Sheryl Crow, Mastodon, Nikki Lane, Exene Cervenka, Jack White, and Kacey Musgraves grace the pages with gallery quality photo work that invites the reader to really gaze at the photo to take in the details. In fact over 120 recording artist’s names appear in the table of contents. The visual diversity throughout McClister’s work here ensures that looking through the book never becomes monotonous, as black and white onstage photos may appear beside a boldly colorful studio portrait, before flipping the page to an experimental long exposure image.
McClister’s photography engages his subjects in wide open natural spaces as well as studio and seemingly candid moments backstage or at a diner. It’s this natural feeling, his resistance to sticking with a single area of speciality, that creates the flow of this book and feeds into the emotion of each image.
All Together Now is a collection of photographs of mainstream music artists that place personality over pretension. For those fans of the artists mentioned and included in this book, David McClister is able to capture and create visual extensions to personalities who composed the songs that many of us are familiar with.
All Together Now: 25 Years of Photographing American Music is available on The Bitter Southerner Press
