Friday Night Lights is a long-term photo essay project focused on bar bands and the people who make them — the musicians, the spaces they play in, and the quiet moments that happen before and after the music fills the room.
On any given Friday night, I step into a small venue with a simple goal: to document a band and its members honestly, as they are, in the place where they are most themselves. The work is part performance, part portrait, and part environment — images of sound translated into still frames, and of people framed by the spaces they inhabit week after week.
Over time, these individual nights will form a larger body of work: a growing archive of local bands and the faces behind the music, rooted in place, proximity, and repetition.
These blog posts do not constitute the project itself. They exist to document how I arrived here — the thinking, preparation, and experimentation that led to this point. They explore working under constraint, experimenting with distance and perspective, and planning with intention before the first frame is made. Together, they serve as the groundwork beneath the project, not the project’s outcome.
- Shooting a Live Band: Event Photography at the Edge of Control
- Friday Night Lights — Closer to the Sound: A 135mm Experiment
- Friday Night Lights: The Plan for This Friday at the Rose
Friday Night Lights is about showing up consistently, listening closely, and building a portrait of a scene one night, one band, and one set of faces at a time.