Photographer Tim Saccenti
The light enters the room through a floor to ceiling window at a crisp 60-degree angle. Facing the window, a man hovers between the vertical and horizontal, arms and legs reaching in front of him, the angle of his distended limbs matching the incline of the sun’s rays. His eyes are closed. Tethered, just barely, to a tilting Bertoia chair, bathed in mid-day illumination, the man is about to crash land onto the thick, carpeted floor. The entranced falling man is Planet E honcho and techno icon Carl Craig. The photographer behind this emblematic and stunning image is Timothy Saccenti.
The image compels because it captures a dramatic temporal transition. The subject is between states. Carl Craig uses ideas and sounds and builds with them—he composes, he DJs, and impacts and transforms dancefloors with his work. The photographer has found a metaphor for his subject’s practice. We are in flux, and time is always determining. Let us fall into a trance and flow gracefully, expression and conduit.
Tim Saccenti is a photographer and filmmaker who lives in New York City. Chances are you have encountered his work more than once in your life. He has photographed a wide range of musicians for a variety of publications: Pharrell, Chromeo, Sparklehorse, Four Tet, Tricky, Arctic Monkeys, Peaches, the list of noted names goes on for some time. He has also done numerous campaigns for global brands like Nike, Addidas, Audi and Sony. What registers in his work isn’t the subject—famous or infamous—or the brand, but instead a delicate field between the recognized and the represented. There is a methodology to his approach that finds a way to open an interrogative exchange with the viewer. Past the reification of most standard portraits, Tim builds a space, where the subject reveals or engages with their own existential threshold. The result is that the viewer isn’t observing a passively closed off subject availed for their enjoyment. (Think porn here, kids.) Instead, they are presented with the subject enacting some aspect of what they are—their “self.” There is a feeling in some of his best portraits that what is occurring happens in the subjects’ mind. We don’t “know” the subject, but we know they exist in a fuller way than usual. A door is opened to their process of thought, and in turn to our own metaphysical selves. We find a field of reflection in what we are witnessing.
Growing up in New Jersey, Tim’s milieu wasn’t overly cultured or bohemian: “Art with a capital A wasn’t something I thought of,” he says. “I remember enjoying watching the light change things in the course of the day, I took a photography class in high school and made a few light paintings—it certainly got me going.”
The worlds of music and skate culture and the visual started to blend for him, and in time Tim made it to NYC. He DJd a bit, did parties with Mal Torrance, started assisting for photographers like David LaChapelle and became part of a crew that hung around Plant Bar on 3rd Street. Many of those on that scene (including Tim Goldsworthy and James Murphy) went on to form DFA records.
Starting out working for magazines like The Source, Tim began to develop his visual sensibility. Influenced by cinema, as well as music and music videos, an inherent theatricality began to emerge and refine itself within his work.
Tim’s direction of the video for “Atlas” by the band Battles is a great example of his approach. He avoids excessive narrative or wrought symbolism. He presents the band in a way that embodies their ethos in a succinct and evocative way. The self-conscious echoplex of the song’s dirge-like fury is played out in a Mylar and Lucite cube as lyrics play out, “People won’t be people when they hear this sound, that’s been glowing in the dark at the edge of town.”
The band, an autonomous energy unit, is observed in their transparent chamber. The camera circles them as they float in some deep, Kubrick-like void, impartially observing like a NASA satellite. The band is the narrative—their way of being, their work. The director presents them thrashing it out and does so in a manner that affords the viewer a similar opportunity.
“Won’t you show me what begins at the edge of town.”
Tim Saccenti Portraits #01 is out now through Bleep
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