Go Get It
An Interview with Danny Clinch
“Once you find something you’re passionate about, you have to go get it, you have to embrace it. Because life is short at the end of the day, and to do stuff that you don’t want to do on a daily basis is just no way to live.”
It was a relatively warm Sunday for early March, the day I visited Danny’s exhibit “Transparent” on the corner of 5th and Kingsley in Asbury Park. I had been wandering around town to kill time before he rolled up in his 1948 Pontiac, black with red rims. Live music sessions are open to the public on Sundays and by 2pm crowds of people flooded the gallery and beautiful acoustics filled the space inbetween. I took a seat next to a photograph of Bruce Springsteen and watched as local musicians shared the spotlight.
Wearing his signature hat and with harmonica in hand, Danny took the stage to join one of the singers. His unmistakable silhouette took shape against the large windows under his iconic Tupac Photograph.The bluesy sound of harp chimed in.
I listened from the back of the room, invisible. Danny finished a set and took a seat in front of me, pulling out his Leica that was slung around his shoulder, and began snapping photos as second nature.
The music stopped and people began filtering out. I waited while he greeted familiar faces and introduced himself to new ones. He was easy going; humble. I could tell he was going to be easy to talk to.
We took a seat in the midst of his artwork archive, between panels of historical documents of rock and roll. "My archive is so deep, there's so much work that I have that has never been seen, that I could stop taking pictures now, and just start digging through everything for the next ten years." "I've been obsessed with taking photographs for a really, really long time".
Music and photography have played such a big role all through his life. When he was a kid his dad always had 50’s compilation records playing in his house and his mother an avid photographer. With support from his family he decided to pursue a career in photography.
Danny didn’t however just stumble into a career as an artist. He worked for it. Before he began receiving requests from Bruce Springsteen and Bob Dylan he was out taking the photos, building his archive. "I had already started shooting photos … and I already started sneaking my camera into concerts all the time”. I had asked Danny to share with me the best piece of advice he had ever received. There was a moment of silence, I could tell he was giving it thought. He mentioned meeting one of his musical idols, James Cotton, an American blues harmonica player, singer, and songwriter who told him "well, you gotta go get it, because it ain't going to come and get you."
He admits to being a lazy teenager. He jokes about working for his father painting houses as a young man. “My father was a hustler”, he said. Danny would sit on the floor to paint the baseboards and his father would complain that he was costing him money every time Danny had to stand up and sit back down. "The average kid, I was pretty lazy as a young man, but the stuff that I liked, I was not lazy about at all."
Once he found photography it became his sole focus in life. He would spend hours in the darkroom. If he wasn’t in the darkroom he was shooting and if he wasn’t shooting he was reading about photography.
"Once you find something you're passionate about, you have to go get it, you have to embrace it. Because life is short at the end of the day, and to do stuff that you don't want to do on a daily basis is just no way to live."
“That Tupac photo there.”, pointing behind him to one of the many photos around the studio, “It’s probably my most well known photo. And there aren’t going to be any more photos of Tupac so…,” he looks down, “sadly”.
Danny’s work is not captured from afar. He is in the crowd or on the stage. He is in the moment. "I'm not way across the room with a zoom lens, I'm right in the room with...", he scans the room for an example piece... "Dave Grohl. I'm basically a fly on the wall, you know like right in the middle of that stuff."
His photos to me are real and genuine. The blurry photos have character, they capture the moment and tell a story. "My philosophy about my work is really coming from an honest place. I'm a big fan of the photograph as a document, and what musicians mean to me and to other fans of music”.