It’s definitely homerish of me to say, but I really like the work of Clayton Hauck, regular Reader contributor and proprietor of Everyone Is Famous; I was pleased to figure out how to run his shots of Pitchfork at 800px wide, because they deserve it.
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He’s technically skilled, obviously, with a talent for getting great color in low-light situations and for on-the-fly composition (note the second pic on this page). And beyond his technical skills, he’s got a knack for… how shall I put this… taking pictures of the sort of people who go to concerts, whose dress and manner, at least if you’re drab and wallflowerish like me (I’m wearing a beige golf shirt today), can seem like kind of a lot, and the pictures are wry about their subjects without being at all condescending. Here’s a good example: he shot the Deadmau5 concert for us a couple weeks ago, and Deadmau5 fans can be a lot of look. And he got good-looking, kind of bro-ish Deadmau5 fans, the sort of people who I could instinctively be maybe a dick about, looking silly (first picture) without any snideness.
It’s not that I don’t like pictures of landscapes, rich people, and martyrs, but Hals and Orpen broke the tension. One too many oversized portraits of noblemen and you start to get a distorted view of the world.
