A rock ‘n’ roll of film life
Ask Robb MacLean which came first, the guitar or the camera, and he chuckles.
“The guitar came first, but I don’t think I started playing it very well for a while,” he says. “I got my first camera when I was 17. I knew I liked photography, but the power of it didn’t really click until later.”
For MacLean, the 24-year-old singer with the rock band Limbeck, photography and songwriting now operate hand in hand as outlets for expression. His songs are Americana-tinged vignettes from the open road; his photos wind-swept vistas and innocent moments, many captured on the band’s cross-country tours.
His shutterbug habits blossomed into a small enterprise. He started selling 3 1/2-by-5-inch prints alongside other merchandise after Limbeck’s club shows. (Eventually he stopped to concentrate on hawking Limbeck’s wares.)
MacLean’s passions more fully coalesced in Limbeck’s second album, “Hi, Everything’s Great,” itself a stylistic advance from the group’s early pop-punk music. The CD package featured 12 postcards, one per song, with a MacLean photograph on front and the lyrics on the back.
Some of the postcards are mere metaphors for the anecdotal tunes, but others are literal and simple. “In Ohio on Some Steps,” with a photo documenting exactly that, relates a rainy morning’s reflections by a young man far removed from his suburban Orange County upbringing.
“The songs were actually written with the photographs right there,” MacLean says. “They would [evoke] a certain mood or remind me of something that happened.”
The album postcards aren’t exactly self-promotional; notably absent is the cliched portrayal of road-weary rock ‘n’ rollers. But in his other photos you might catch bandmate Patrick Carrie playing with a cat, or Justin Entsminger and Matt Stephens in conversation, unposed.
Now available through his website, www.becivil.net, MacLean’s photographs, shot with one of his two Nikons or an old Yashica, reflect an aesthetic Kerouac would have loved, wide-eyed and often fleeting glimpses in cities and from roadsides. “The kind of things that make me feel nostalgic,” MacLean says.
There is the desert vista split by two long shadows, snapped on his first date with his girlfriend. There is a wintry night scene, colors oversaturated, with a lone set of tire tracks in the new-fallen snow. There is an excursion into a rickety barn at some Midwestern outpost. There is a majestic tree, light diffused through its limbs.
“A lot of the photographs use infrared film -- it makes things look kind of dreamy,” MacLean says. “The leaves on the trees turn white, the clouds get all puffy.... Everything gets very Ansel Adams-y.”
His photos have earned him a few assignments shooting artwork for other musicians’ albums, which has led to experiments with slide film and photo collages. None of his photographs are shot digitally and only a few -- the collages -- are digitally manipulated.
Many are snapped from a moving car, while listening to the likes of Wilco, Ryan Adams, Tom Petty or the Weakerthans, when MacLean and his bandmates are en route to a distant gig.
“At one-thirtieth of a second you can get an image where the foreground is slightly blurred but stuff in the distance is sharp -- it’s almost like a happy accident,” MacLean says. “Those shots are also good for my bandmates, because we don’t have to stop.”
Kevin Bronson can be contacted at kevin.bronson@latimes.com.
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Robb MacLean
Photography
Price: Prints generally range from $20 to $50 depending on size.
Info: www.becivil.net
Limbeck shows
Saturday: Chain Reaction, 1652 W. Lincoln Ave., Anaheim. 7 p.m. $8.
(714) 635-6067
Sunday: AlterKnit Lounge in the
Knitting Factory Hollywood, 7021 Hollywood Blvd., Hollywood. 8 p.m. $8. (323) 463-0204
Info: www.hieverythingsgreat.com or www.limbeck.net