Photography | Ragged Band · Dispatches from the Creative Life

Matt Wignall

By: Ben Bishop

04·30·2013

“I started a band in high school with a few friends, and we played some backyard keggers, and by that time it was clear I was not suited for any kind of structured job.”

The word jack is evocative of roguish qualities. Three-day stubble and cool competence. JFK, Jack Nicholson, and Jack Daniels. Jack the Ripper. Blackjack. Sgt. Whiskeyjack and Captain Jack Sparrow.

Fitting, then, that Matt Wignall is a true jack-of-all-trades.

As a photographer he’s shot bands including Edward Sharpe & The Magnetic Zeroes, My Brightest Diamond, J. Roddy Walston & The Business and Thrice, and worked on fashion projects for companies like Volcom and NSF.

He has his hand in the world of moving pictures, having filled the roles of cinematographer, director and/or producer on a range of projects, from numerous music videos to commercial pieces with a documentary flair.

He is a producer and audio engineer who has cut records with Delta Spirit, Mando Diao, Cold War Kids, The Fling, and Deep Sea Diver. His analog recording studio, Tackyland, sits in back of his Long Beach home.

He is the former lead singer of Havalina Rail Co., whose music is too rich and varied to even begin to attempt describing here.

He is a graphic designer.

He’s involved in some capacity with these guys.

His wife, Judita Wignall, is a raw and organic foods cookbook author.

When I contacted Matt about an interview, I opened my e-mail with the following three anecdotes:

1 – In the fall of 1999 my insufferable thrash band, 4 Pete’s Sake, opened for Havalina Rail Co. in the fellowship hall of a small church on the west side of Santa Cruz, CA. Seventeen people attended. One was my mom. Midway through our set our bass player fell down and simultaneously unplugged all of our amps. You and Orlando were kind afterwards.

2 – In the spring of 2007 some friends and I were picking up a trailer that our buddies in Cold War Kids had gifted us. It happened to be parked in your driveway. While lifting the trailer to back it onto our truck’s hitch, we inadvertently struck, knocked over, and utterly destroyed a ceramic chiminea that belonged to you and your wife.

3 – Last year while having coffee with a friend who will remain nameless I was told an apocryphal-sounding story involving you, XXXXXX, a Mexican wedding, a speedo and a toothbrush. I’m not sure I believed it.

Andy Barron

By: Ben Bishop

02·01·2013

Design, Film, Interviews, Music, Photography

I have a clear memory of the first time I saw Andy Barron. It was a warm evening in late August, 2001, and I was lying in bed. It was my first night away at college. Just as I was about to fall asleep, the door of my dorm room cracked open and someone slunk inside, attempting to be quiet.

I knew that one of my two roommates was named Andy. We’d even spoken briefly on the phone ahead of move-in day. But I had no idea what he looked like. Being the shrewd fellow that I am, I feigned sleep. I figured if I was about to be robbed by a malingering undergraduate taking advantage of unattended belongings during the chaos of move-in week, I would wait until he got closer and then brain him with my alarm clock.

Instead, the shadowy figure clambered up the edge of the bunk bed, shaking it crazily in the process, such that if I had been asleep I would have woken in a panic thinking an earthquake had struck, and proceeded to fling a guitar bearing a Jimmy Eat World sticker onto the mattress along with a backpack and various other sundry items before climbing back down and immediately leaving again. Two days later I found out it was Andy.

The phrase “one thing led to another” seems to have been invented for Andy, who by now has been making his living as a graphic designer, photographer, tour manager, press wrangler and videographer for over a decade. He has toured extensively with Switchfoot and Foster The People, and has taken captivating photographs, perusable on his website, of everyone from The Jonas Brothers to Paper Route.

Of all the artists I’ve had occasion to know, he is one of the least pretentious, least neurotic, and least anxious. He comes across as being singularly unconcerned with whether or not people find him, or what he “is into,” to be sufficiently cool. Which makes him a very easy person to be around in an industry generally rife with insecure men and women desperately trying to manage others’ impressions of them.

We corresponded via email.

Joshua Longbrake – RB 2012 Blog of the Year

By: Ben Bishop

11·21·2012

Photography, Writers

I went to grad school with Joshua Longbrake, but I never got to know him. We said hello in passing a few times, but didn’t ever get around to sitting down to a substantive conversation. Then he moved to Chicago shortly before I left town for Portland. I’ve kept tabs on him through his blog.

And what a blog it is. Quixotic, unapologetic, often poignant, occasionally weird. A runaway winner for the Ragged Band 2012 Blog of the Year Award.

Longbrake is a talented photographer who has made his living taking pictures, but he’s also passionate about writing and speaking. He’s got a particular facility for examining the interplay between art and faith; those gray lines delineating the space between hope and despair, depravity and holiness. Lines that weave like a drunk and at times disappear completely. He’s the kind of dude who loves Tom Waits. In fact, he’s recently given a series of lectures that included one devoted to old Tom.

If you’ve ever had cause to revisit why it is that you make art in the first place, or found yourself grinding and grinding, doing shit work in the hopes it will lead to something bigger and better, all with the dream of someday getting your big break, you need to read his essay on the idea of giving up.

Mickey Smith, Surf Photographer

By: Ben Bishop

01·24·2012

Film, Photography

If I only scrape a living, at least it’s a living worth scraping. If there’s no future in it, at least it’s a present worth remembering. – Mickey Smith, Dark Side of the Lens

At the southeastern tip of England, in the county of Cornwall, lies the town of Penzance. Head south out of town for three miles and you’ll come to the tiny hamlet of Paul. Host to wet, cold winters, and best known to the larger world for its various associations with piratical figures, it doesn’t seem like the kind of place that would have fostered a dedicated surfer, much less one who would one day become a highly respected, well-traveled photographer of the sport.

Mickey Smith is a mild-mannered fellow with a thick Cornish accent and a weakness for bad weather. In 2010, in the wake of his sister’s death, Smith released a short film that upended the hoary clichés of a genre fixated on the pursuit of endless summer. “Dark Side of the Lens” was filmed on the frozen western coast of Ireland in the middle of winter, and features towering cliffs, iron skies, and swirling black waters. As the images stream past Smith delivers a sort of mystical, stream-of-consciousness monologue on his life in the water. The film somehow manages to convey a sacred feeling without coming off as overwrought, an achievement largely attributable to the honesty of Smith’s narration, and the pure unbridled beauty and power of the land- and waterscapes he documents. Filled with wheeling gulls and thundering currents, they are places at once ominous and exuberant.

A Conversation With Photojournalist Julie Platner

By: Ben Bishop

10·24·2011

Photography

On May 1st, Jeff Hall, the leader of the California chapter of the National Socialist Movement, a neo-Nazi group, was shot and killed in the living room of his own home by his 10-year-old son. As part of their coverage of Hall’s murder, the New York Times ran a series of intensely compelling photographs taken by 29-year-old photojournalist Julie Platner.

The pictures depict NSM members doing things one would expect, like giving the Nazi salute at rallies and holding up flags featuring swastikas, but they also draw back the curtain on the group’s domestic side. There are barbecues and babies, children playing at the feet of their militant parents, and, in some of the video Ms. Platner took which was later used by 60 Minutes in their coverage of Hall’s death, a quiz game.

In the interview that accompanied Ms. Platner’s photographs in the Times she was described as having given herself the assignment of covering the NSM. I was fascinated by the idea that someone so early in her career would have the impulse and tenacity required to see such an intimidating project through to completion, let alone come up with the idea. While doing research in preparation for our interview I learned that this was not the first time Ms. Platner has put herself in a dangerous position to get a story. She traveled to Haiti for the Wall Street Journal in early 2010 to cover the earthquake that devastated the island nation.

Interview with Laurel Dailey, Photographer

By: Ben Bishop

09·01·2011

Interviews, Photography

The arc of photographer Laurel Dailey’s editorial sensibility bends toward the world of fashion. Her pictures have a sensuality to them, a lushness that derives in part from the close attention she pays to setting. Shirtless men charge across sand dunes or emerge soaking from pools of water. Beautiful women vamp for the camera in front of spreading palm fronds.

In addition to their sultry edge, Dailey’s images convey a certain playfulness; a romping spirit that evokes the hotel bedroom scene from Almost Famous, where the lithe groupies are running around William as he sits on the bed, horny and gloriously confused.

Interview with Adam Sjöberg, Photographer

By: Ben Bishop

07·12·2011

Film, Interviews, Photography

Trying to keep up with Adam Sjöberg’s travel itinerary is a Sisyphean task. Whether on a mission to capture images for corporate clients, bear vibrant witness to various humanitarian causes, or document exquisite weddings as part of his standing gig with one of New York’s most prestigious boutique wedding photography outfits, Ira Lippke Studios, Mr Sjöberg seems to exist in the act of being perpetually slungshot between continents. It’s hard to imagine the guy sleeping.

Matt Wignall

Andy Barron

Joshua Longbrake – RB 2012 Blog of the Year

Mickey Smith, Surf Photographer

A Conversation With Photojournalist Julie Platner

Interview with Laurel Dailey, Photographer

Interview with Adam Sjöberg, Photographer

About Ragged Band

Contact Information

Post Categories

Archives