Book Review: Nicholas Zinner's I Hope You Are All Happy Now

reviewed by dave heaton

Nothing about the description "book of photographs by a rock musician" is all that enticing to me. And the Rolling Stone quote on the front of Nicholas Zinner's I Hope You Are All Happy Now, referring to the photos bringing us "behind the music for real", doesn't help much either (though I suppose it might appeal on a certain level if I was a bigger fan of Zinner's band the Yeah Yeah Yeahs, if I was more anxious to 'see what makes them tick' or whatever). Refreshingly, though, I Hope You Are All Happy Now isn't filled with rock-star iconography, and definitely isn't the vanity project of a hack photographer. Rather than 'rock star photos', these are one man's warm and very human photographs of the world around him, of life as it unfolds. There's much feeling in these pictures, Zinner has a great knack at capturing the feeling of a moment. I would hope that the book is in the Photography section of your local book store, and not the Music section, because it'll stand strongly with the works of accomplished contemporary photographers.

Life on tour with a rock band is the major focus of the book, as it no doubt was of Zinner's life when the photos were taken. But the results aren't cliched, aren't exactly what you'd expect, and all the way through are uniquely arresting, entertaining, moving. There's portraits of friends and bandmates, capturing moods and personalities well. There's a fascinating collection of photos, taken from stage, of the crowds at Yeah Yeah Yeahs shows across the globe. Each bears a simple location-year title ( i.e. "Melbourne October 2003"). Looking at these simple crowd photos inspires so many questions, about how people are different or the same from place to place, about the personality a group of strangers has together when sectioned off by the camera like this, about what people want from a rock show, and how people behave when they realize they're on camera, or don't.

Photos capturing details from life on the road - bruised hands, empty room-service dishes in a hallway, vomit on a sidewalk - are filled with immediacy, bringing you to the moment in a visceral and genuine way. A series of photos of empty hotel-room beds are evocative in a similar way, and also quite familiar. Somehow a sense of familiarity runs through the whole book. Now I've never been on tour, never stood on stage, never had a video shoot, never been to the MTV Video Awards...it's the mood and feeling in his photographs that make them feel so familiar. At the same time, the book is also filled with surprising images and details, and Zinner captures well the strangeness and mysteriousness of people and places and circumstances. They're very perceptive photographs, and inspiring; like the best art they reflect the world back to us, in a way that's at once new and old, familiar and strange.