Neil Krug: True Grit

Using old and out-of-date film, Neil Krug has taken  the vintage route to a new way of seeing, with videos and photoshoots for the likes of Davendra Banhart, My Chemical Romance and The Horrors. Ryan Watson joins him for a lesson behind the lens.

It’s official; shooting vintage is cool. You only need to sign into Twitter to be inundated with people sharing anything from what they had for lunch to the view out of the train window via Instagram. The iPhone app manipulates modern images to give them a typical look of the Kodak Instamatic and Polaroid cameras of the past and the result is a classic feel and effect. Neil Krug, however, prefers the real deal, but there’s only so much he’ll say: “Aside from telling you that I use expired films, Polaroid, as well as the 120 medium film format, a little digital, and a few unique CGI elements, my lips are sealed – one should rarely see behind the curtain,” he says. “My style has been influenced by cinema and the iconography from westerns and the psychedelic art movement in the 60s and 70s.”

His route into photography is refreshingly different to most who have adorned these pages and it was the demands of a directing job which led to him trying his hand at stills work.

“I was shooting videos before I started taking photographs, so the transition was backwards for me, in some ways,” confirms the 28 year-old Kansas native, now based in Los Angeles. “If there’s one thing to take away, it is how to approach shooting something in motion versus shooting a still image. Both serve two different purposes, and it’s up to you as the artist to hone the viewer in on what you’re trying to accomplish.”

The first sign of ‘honing’ came a few years back on the set of his feature film, Invisible Pyramid. He’d needed press shots of the leads but was “too broke to hire someone”, so picked up the camera himself. On the back of that bold move, his images began garnering interest online, and having had a longstanding interest in art in general and the photographic medium in particular, he thought there could be something in it.

“I started [photography series] Pulp Art Book with Joni Harbeck and everything started rolling, from directing videos to shooting musicians for album art work and publicity,” says Krug, before recalling an interesting delivery with Harbeck, who is now his wife: “The day before Joni went into labour; we were shooting the Jackie series of Pulp Art Book. She was very pregnant and having contractions. I remember her saying that if we were going to shoot the pregnant series then we needed to do it now because the baby was coming.”

Krug has completed jobs for various bands including US indie rockers My Chemical Romance, which saw them dressed in some interesting animated gear: “The Danger Days outfits were designed by Oscar-winning designer Colleen Atwood,” he says. “She and Gerard [Way] came up with the costumes for that campaign and it’s one of my favourite packages I’ve done with a band, because the vision was so unique.”

In other series, Heist sees a girl, Rosemary, rolling a joint to relax before carrying out a bank job, images which will feature in Pulp Art Book: Volume Two; and there’s a bloodbath in Bonnie, set in a car after a shoot-out gets out of control.

Having signed with Honey Badger LA at the end of 2010 “to expand my video portfolio”, Krug most recently shot a promo for artist Gonjasufi’s The Blame, taken from his MU.ZZ.LE album.