Postcards from a foreign land

Guest post from Nicole Paciello (@nicoledandy):

Moving to Leeds wasn’t exactly the easiest thing I’ve done in my life. However, it turned out to be the best decision I could possibly ever take. I’m 22 and I spent 20 years of my life in a beautiful luminous boring city in the north west coast of Italy, Genova, the city in Europe with the highest rate of ancient people.

I grew up in a music friendly environment – I have been exposed to listening to music since I was in my crib as my parents wouldn’t let one day pass without playing records, old or new. They have been passionate about the British and American indie music scene for years and consenquently my early exposure to Psychocandy or Bob Dylan or U2. My mum’s biggest concern since my early age was that I learnt speaking English – therefore she made me listen to Oasis and taught me the basics, lending me her schoolbooks even before I started studying it in primary school.

Italian music scene doesn’t really exist, or well, it exists but I don’t think you can consider it a cultural aspect as I believe it is in anglophone countries. Italian music has a history, just like music in every other country, and some relevant artists emerged mainly in the 60s or 70s, but that’s about it and to be honest, they were mostly poets rather than musicians.

The Italian music business is very restricted and barely promoted, and it’s only in the past 20 years or so that a growing interest in British indie music scene seem to have been spreading among teenagers, who sometimes ridiculously try to mock the fashion side of the scene. Union Jack flags, and everything fancy is what had the most appeal to the Italian crowds who most of the time seem to be forgetting what’s really behind the fancy skinny-jeans scenery. I tried to melt in these crowds but still didn’t feel at home and found instead a hostile competition between these “stylish kids” which left nearly no space for what was meant to bound them together: the music.

I must confess in a way I was part of the scene and I’ve always been fascinated by everything British for this very reason, and needless to say its incredibly wide music scene that brought me here. In fact it is music that has boosted my passion for photography, and I think it’s probably the main reason why I considered “photography” in the first place. After all the time I spent daydreaming in my room listening to records (I still remember playing “Room on Fire” and “Whatever People Say I am …” over and over again until nausea), I felt the need to externalize this passion in some way so I decided to start bringing my camera to the sporadic gigs I had the luck to go to and started being acquainted with the world of digital photography.

It all started with a small 5 mega pixel point and shoot Pentax Optio 50L camera and a Franz Ferdinand gig in Turin back in 2006, where I started being obsessed by the idea of taking really good pictures of my favourite artists. I then opened my Flickr account, and surprisingly received a very good feedback even on these beginners low quality shots. After some months, I would change it with a new Canon point and shoot camera (and that’s where my passion for Canon really began) and took several photos at all the gigs I could possibly manage to go to.

It’s thanks to all the support that my parents and my boyfriend at the time have given me in cherishing this passion that I finally bought my first real DSLR camera in February 2008, which I still own and proudly use.

Hence I started contributing to some Italian webzines, but most of the time it was the distance from Milan or Rome or Bologna that got in the way and made me miss many many gigs, so I decided that music photography wasn’t enough to satisfy my need of expressing myself. I started shooting architecture, buildings, landscapes, spiders, clouds, all the things that caught my eye for whatever reasons. Basically everything that I considered to be representative of my generally dissatisfied and discontented mood, in a way it helped me in observing what was happening around me with a more accurate eye, without however feeling part of it.

Some of the shots I took in those years (2008/2009) were later featured in an open-air independent exhibition of young emerging talents for Progetto Intro (2008), a Genoese collective of students which now don’t exist anymore.

However, it’s when I started studying Modern Foreign Languages and Literature at the University of Genova that things started looking up for me: I won an Erasmus grant and I finally had the long-awaited opportunity to leave. I arrived in Leeds in September 2009 and lived in Clarence Dock Student Residences for one year. Needless to say, after some days of confusion and getting used to the cold English weather, I fell in love with Leeds and, above all, my new life.

Slowly I started going around and getting to know the city better, taking long walks by the river and shooting the sky and the clouds, which (weirdly enough) looked so different from the clouds I used to see in Italy.

As soon as I arrived to Leeds I didn’t want to miss a thing. Everything seemed to be happening so fast compared to Genova, and there was so much to do that I felt overwhelmed by all the interesting events happening. So the first weekend I spent here I decided not to waste my time and ventured to the Fenton pub to see Televised Crimewave, the new band of ex-members of Black Wire (they now both sadly split up) and I honestly can still remember my excitement. Clearly I had brought my camera and funnily enough that very night I received a very good response about my shots, which motivated me even more to carry on my music photography passion and yes, to go to even more gigs.

I started getting involved in societies at University of Leeds and the Union Music Library played a big role in helping me in the process of getting to know Leeds nightlife, even club-wise. I still remember my first trips to the Brudenell Social Club, the Common Place, the Cockpit, the Subculture (RIP – Idioteque was my favourite night out in Leeds and I’m yet to find a worthy substitute) and Nation of Shopkeepers, which had recently opened at the time.

After some months I started finding out more about local bands and the “Yorkshire scene”, so I  inevitably grew fond of some new bands – this is the case of The Neat, a young talented band from Hull which left me speechless after seeing them performing for the first time at the Brudenell Social Club in March 2010. After that gig I basically followed (stalked) them anywhere around Yorkshire, taking lots and lots of pictures, obviously.

I brought my camera to nearly all the gigs I went to and quite quickly I started  getting involved with some local magazines  – Faux Magazine, The Leeds Guide, FreedomSpark, No-Title Magazine just to mention a few.

As this still wasn’t (and isn’t) enough for me, I decided to take up analog photography and started collecting the oldest cameras I could find, which span from Polaroid to Pentax to an old Russian World War II Zorki camera kindly given to me from my lovely grandparents. I now have a wide collection of old cameras but my latest obsession is 120mm expired film to use in my Diana F+ toy camera. The atmosphere that film gives to photos is just something that cannot be replaced or replicated in a digital work.

Digital can be handy, especially when it comes to gig photography, but the beauty of film is just something on another level, and mostly I thought it filled the missing gap in my old architectural, clouds / anything photos. It adds the confusion and contradictory nature of what catches my eye, it generates beautiful and unpredictable colours that cannot be decided beforehand. All these features make film shots unique and unreproducible.

I like this one-off experience, the power it confers you of creating something that cannot be reproduced ever in that exact same way. I like the fact that it gives me endless freedom to experiment without the risk of slipping into standardised and uniformed effects and colours that seem to often appear in overly post-processed digital photographs. (It’s the case of this new fashion of the yellowish/sunburnt/blurred effect, basically 5 out 7 photos now have that appalling effect). I’m yet to find a better way of expressing my moods through photography other than film; whether it is taking a picture of a cloud or of a flower, it just suits me all the times.

Despite the fact I use a digital camera to shoot gigs, I try not to break the magic (excuse the Harry Potter-ism) that lights create, as in my opinion lights play a very relevant part in the mood of the concert or at least in how the spectator actually “sees” it. Hence my decision not to use flash as I feel it literally kills this mood, and the mood is what I’m mostly trying to reproduce in my photographs, whether they are of clouds or of musicians.