What Tom Barman does know: where he was when he decided to start shooting. Namely in Los Angeles, where he was recording the VPRO program Shot on Location†
What Tom Barman doesn’t know: why it happened just then and just there. Photography was always present in his life, says Barman (50). He sits at a table in his second home in Portugal where he stays for much of the year. Bartender moves back and forth a lot and gestures with pressure with his hands, occasionally bringing the tip of his cigarette dangerously close to the lens of his iPad. Long ago, before he sold more than 1.7 million albums as the front man of rock formation dEUS, Barman studied at the film school of the Sint-Lukas Hogeschool in Brussels. He never finished training (the life of a rock star beckoned), but continued to use his love for image and feeling for composition in producing the video clips for dEUS.
He had to discover that feeling, that love for film himself. “There was not a single artist in my family. The only thing that came close was my father, who was an amateur photographer and had a good eye for images.’ But the love for photography only really took hold of Barman when he was over 40. ‘I was always sarcastic about photography; I’m quite a kinetic person and photography seemed so static, so boring to me.’ Until he got the ghost in Los Angeles and the cameraman from the VPRO program took him to Samy’s Camera on Fairfax Avenue, the photography shop in the city, and let him buy a Sony Nex-5 there. ‘From that moment on, completely in accordance with my nature, I started shooting like mad.’
Suburbs
That was ten years ago. Barman is now allowed, after publishing his own photo book (Hurry up and wait) and multiple exhibits, really call a photographer. ‘In the end, it fits well with my character: I can’t sit still, I travel a lot, there are many dead hours and I get to places that photographers dream of. By that I don’t mean the center of Florence – that’s way too beautiful to photograph, but if you walk around the outskirts of Leipzig, you start to see things. And those suburbs, that’s where we often come with dEUS, because that’s usually where the concert stages and clubs are located.’ Everywhere he went with dEUS, it was the same: ‘I crawled out of the tour bus in the morning, went for a walk and didn’t stop.’
Flip through Barman’s photo book and what stands out is the withdrawn images, a certain silence, a hint of loneliness. In any case, Barman’s photography contrasts sharply with the exuberant, restless, colorful and expressive man who keeps holding his cigarette so close to the lens that the smoke can almost be smelled more than three thousand kilometers away. His photos seem to be not so much a reflection of his character, but a counterweight to it. ‘I do have that quiet side, which sometimes comes up in my music. But it is correct. It is also no coincidence that in the same period that I started photographing, I also started meditating. There’s a link there. I don’t know exactly what – and I don’t want to analyze it too much, then it gets so woolly and swollen – but there is a connection. What I also like about photography: I don’t have to speak so much. People see an image and they feel something about it – or not.’
In his photo album there are no texts with the photos for the wonderfully simple reason that Bartender just doesn’t feel like it, because he already has enough dicks in the rest of his life. ‘As a traveling musician you have to talk and explain yourself so much. Receiptthere are worse things in life, but sometimes you just get tired of it.’
trepidation
Another thing that stands out about Barman’s photos: there are hardly any people in them. It’s not just for artistic reasons. ‘With the band I visit many desolate places where there is nothing to experience. That’s the purely practical side of things. But it is also shy. A strange paradox of modern life is that people throw everything up on the internet, but if you take a picture of them, they’ll slap you in the mouth. We used to shoot a lot of video clips where we walked in somewhere with a rotating camera, filmed what we needed and then left. That’s getting harder and harder.’
Bartender finds it difficult to name his favorite photo. But then he disappears from view for a while, there is a rumble and he eventually comes back. He is holding a framed photo in front of the camera. About half of the image consists of a clear, azure sky. The other half, it seems, consists of gray-black steel with a small rectangular, light-blue surface. It’s a photo of the rear-view mirror of his jeep in Portugal. rhinoceros is the name of the photo, and why he thinks this photo turned out well, Barman can’t or won’t say either. Don’t talk too much. Not too many words. Just this: ‘I live for a long time with my photos. I let them sink in. I forget them. And then I remember them again.’
