Moby – Destroyed

Posted by Fabio 5 April 2011

Destroyed, Moby’s forthcoming new album and accompanying book of photography is set for release on May 16th, alongside an exhibition, which will take place at Proud Galleries from 18 May – 19 June. Published by Damiani, the hardback edition of Destroyed is 128 pages and features 55 photographs taken by Moby. All photographs from the book will be on display in the exhibition and are for sale.

A behind-the-scenes international odyssey, Destroyed introduces us to a side of touring that is often unexposed; secluded time spent in artificial spaces like hotel rooms and backstage waiting areas. The combined album and photo book provides an intimate look at Moby’s world and his creative process as an artist, both the music and photos were created in the same period and draw inspiration from the strange and sublime world of touring.

There are contrasting images of luminous but lonely hotel room vistas alongside vast, swaying crowd scenes, as snapped from the stage; their juxtaposition seemingly saying everything about the very psychological dislocation, the dramatic yin and yang of the international touring musician’s life. As Moby puts it, “Touring is all contrasts and strangeness, and that’s what I’m trying to convey in these pictures.”

Taking, developing and printing photographs are not new departures for Moby. Once a graduate student of film and photography at SUNY Purchase (State University of New York), he’s been a keen SLR lensman ever since he was presented with a camera, aged ten, by his Uncle – a photographer at The New York Times.

To this day Moby carries camera wherever he goes. The title and front cover of Destroyed depicts the final part of an LED security warning: Unattended luggage will be destroyed, which Moby snapped as it flashed up in a deserted hallway at New York’s La Guardia airport. Explains Moby, “One of my goals through my pictures is to take the normal and present it as odd and to take the odd and present it as normal.”

Although keen on a number of contemporary practitioners, Moby’s key photographic influences are drawn mostly from the early-to-mid 20th century, including such names as Irving Penn, André Kertész and Edward Steichen. Other, more recent influences include Sally Mann and Wolfgang Tillmans. “The technique behind photography in the ‘70s and ‘80s almost took precedent over the composition itself, and then Wolfgang Tillmans came along and said, ‘by the way, if you have a crummy little instamatic camera you can make remarkable images’, and there’s something really liberating about that.”

Moby’s songs from Destroyed were written late at night in hotel rooms around the world. A soundtrack for empty cities at 2AM, Destroyed evokes nocturnal feelings of both anxious isolation and the comfort of quiet solitude. The result is a 15-track collection that conflates the atmospheric and the disconcerting with the enveloping and beautiful – a record rich in the kind of melodies that are lodged in the brain by stealth rather than with a bludgeon.

www.moby.com
www.proud.co.uk