Todd Wolfson is the most prolific and widely published music photographer you’ve never heard of. A native of Austin, Texas, Wolfson has been in the business for close to 40 years and has captured over a thousand members of the city’s music community on film, from Willie Nelson to Roky Erickson. But despite the long careers and histories of those artists, Wolfson never gets intimidated by his subjects. Photographing musicians simply comes naturally to him. “I tend to gravitate towards musicians,” Wolfson said. “It’s afforded me getting to the people I really love. I mean, Delbert McClinton, he feels more like my dad than a music legend.” Currently, Wolfson is working on his forthcoming book, “Fanboy,” which features photos of artists such as Frank Zappa, Alice Cooper, and Stevie Ray Vaughan, to name just a few. But whoever the subject is, he has a preternatural understanding of his subjects, and his photos capture them with an energy that jumps out of the frame. We spoke with Todd to ask him about the stories behind ten of his most engaging photos.
Image Credit: Todd V. Wolfson..
1. John Doe (2021)
“That was the day we were shooting stuff for his album, ‘Fables in a Foreign Land,’ Wolfson said, adding that Doe’s work in movies over the years has made him an ideal photographic subject. “When I photograph him, he knows how to work his face and his emotions.
Image Credit: Todd V. Wolfson..
2. Willie and Bobbie Nelson (2007)
“They were in such a great mood because they love each other so much,” Wolfson said of the brother and sister musicians. “I literally took about 27 snaps, just rapid-fire. One ended up in an article in the Statesman, and it ended up also as their backstage pass for about a year.”
Image Credit: Todd V. Wolfson..
3. Dave Alvin (2018)
“To me, it’s all about the eyes in a photo, whether they’re looking away or they’re looking at you,” Wolfson said of the perceptible emotion and energy that pops out of his photos. “When I’m editing, I think that’s almost always my starting point. What’s going on with the eyes?”
Image Credit: Todd V. Wolfson..
4. Roky Erickson (2009)
“There was just a Roky Erickson tribute record that came out maybe a couple of years ago, and that photo is one of the four they used packaging it,” he said. While Erickson famously struggled with his mental health over the course of his adult life, Wolfson said it didn’t prevent him from getting the shots he needed to get. “I think part of my psyche is really good at dealing with people and communicating with people that are kind of the people that maybe not everybody can connect with because their wiring has been frazzled in different ways, and Roky’s one of those people.”
Image Credit: Todd V. Wolfson..
5. Alejandro Escovedo (2012)
“Al is one of my best friends in the world, and this friend of ours, a costumer for films, made us this shiny sharkskin suit,” Wolfson said. “Minutes after taking this shot, the glass was just covered with raindrops and he’s in a sharkskin suit that I can’t take him outside in. One water drop is going to show, so if there are ten water drops, I’d be photoshopping ‘til the end of time.”
Image Credit: Todd V. Wolfson..
6. Thurston Moore (2007)
“He would come to South by Southwest a few times with different bands, like him and three other people that were into the same kind of loud experimental weirdness,” Wolfson said. “That was maybe not the loudest show I’d ever been to, but the vibrations of the music, when they hit a certain note or when he made this certain harmonic thing, all the displays on my camera started flashing like a robot going out of control.”
Image Credit: Todd V. Wolfson..
7. Jimmy Dale Gilmore and Dave Alvin (2018)
“That’s literally us just spending a few hours with the boys,” he said. “It was shot in this weird old car lot that had been abandoned near my house, but I’m one of those guys that knows every square inch of Austin as far as textures go. I knew it had that oversized picket fence that was dilapidated, and that’s kind of what I wanted. I kind of wanted rural-urban, which there’s a lot of around Austin.”
Image Credit: Todd V. Wolfson..
8. Lukas Nelson (2017)
“This was a shot I took of him while he was being interviewed, so you’re getting a natural reaction,” Wolfson said. “I’m going to tell you, I’ve been lucky enough to work with Bobbie, Willie, Lukas, and Paula Nelson – I know there’s a lot of Nelsons but I’ve been lucky enough to work with four of them.”
Image Credit: toddvwolfson.tumblr.com.
9. Daniel Johnston (2015)
“This day is in his room or in one of his rooms in his own little house in Waller,” Wolfson said. “As you can see, he’s got nine gajillion VHS tapes, and if you look even closer, you can see some of them are the exact same ones over and over… you can see how stained his shirt is, because the guy couldn’t drink a Coke or eat a spoonful of food or whatever without spilling it on his gut.”
Image Credit: Todd V. Wolfson..
10. Arthur Brown (2017)
“I grew up on the Crazy World of Arthur Brown,’” Wolfson said. “I was like, ‘I want you to treat your face like a painting canvas and not do it like the Crazy World of Arthur Brown, but I want that vibe… that was the one, of all the ones I looked through afterwards, that felt the most like a perfect combination of connecting with his soul like I like to do and the Crazy World of Arthur Brown. That photo is my ode to the Crazy World.”
To see more of Todd V. Wolfson’s work, check out his website.
This article was produced and syndicated by MediaFeed.
Image Credit: Todd V. Wolfson..
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