What did favorite acts look like 25 years ago? And why was Linus Volkmann never held accountable?
Reproduction free of charge, proof requested
When I was offered a position in the editorial department of one of the most widely circulated German music magazines in the noughties, the change from analog to digital work was already well advanced. Everything revolved around emails and the in-house website. DVDs replaced VHS cassettes, you no longer recorded your interviews with a sturdy dictaphone, but with the equally fetishized, error-prone and short-lived invention of the DAT recorder and you had to decide which ten favorite SMS messages you wanted in your Sony Ericsson -I wanted to keep my cell phone saved. Understandably, in these technology-obsessed times, the interns looked rather askance when the store’s boss at the time tried to tell them to take care of the photo archive.
Discussions raged in the highly frequented online forums about the socio-political implications of Samy Deluxe’s “Wake Me Up” and whether Oasis would now finally be counted as a waste with STANDING ON THE SHOULDER OF GIANTS – and a poor practitioner, on the other hand, had to spend thousands in a windowless room Sorting promo photos into overflowing folders, which in turn overflowed from various meters of shelves. Why were there so many such pictures in one editorial office? In the pre-digital era, record companies not only sent sample CDs to all kinds of media from which they hoped to get reviews, but also always included current press photos. So that a possible article could of course also be appropriately illustrated.
The influx of this material was really enormous. What, however, could not be said about the love in return. Because it wasn’t just the practitioners who turned up their noses at the flood of images. Of course, we editors were also far too good to include any press photos that came along in our premium magazine. Maybe the desolate Ottos could do that in their poppy city magazines, but we certainly can’t do that with our Big Styler magazine! After all, we had an ambitious photo editor and an extremely well-dressed art director. The annoying “photo archive” was just a millstone around the neck of our horniness.
Did I mention that pop magazine editors were pretty arrogant back then? Or could you think of it yourself anyway?
Let promo photos mature like good wine
However, I have to say that I have always had a certain soft spot for this visual collecting project. Not so much because of the supposed utility – I mean, why would you fill a current Depeche Mode article with the photos from five years ago? The pictures that were filed away became old and their news value was lost all too quickly. That was clearly her problem – but also her appeal. What a cool band looked like three years ago may seem rather outdated. But what it looked like ten years ago is interesting again.
When I quit my job in that editorial office in the 1900s, the photo archive was of course more lost than ever. Nobody sorted anything at all and, above all, the record companies had long since stopped sampling “real” prints; images are stored digitally on the respective servers and are much more sustainable than all this paper work. So I didn’t feel particularly guilty when, to say goodbye, I rummaged through the folders and “gifted” myself a few stacks of particularly beautiful promotional photos from earlier – to avoid the negative word “steal”.
In this column I’m sharing a few of them with you. See me as the Robin Hood of promos – and not as the greedy Gollum of a former photo editorial team.
The gallery
This courage to look stupid should be rewarded. I leave us all from this little museum of promotional pop photography with one of the band’s few surviving songs. Have fun!
What happened until now? Here is an overview of all the pop column texts.
