ESTER SEGARRA
Over the past 15 years, Ester Segarra’s photography has come to define the underground metal scene. As her new book illustrates, it’s been a personal journey, too
one of underground metal’s most celebrated photographers, ester Segarra is releasing her first book.
ost people spend their lives searching for something: a place where they belong, a purpose for their being, the essence of things. It seems like Ester Segarra has found all that in music photography. Born and raised in Barcelona, a place where taking photos for a living seemed impossible, Ester’s quest for her destiny led her to London where she started getting into the extreme metal scene through her first photo assignments in 2001. Seventeen years later, she is one of the most prolific photographers in the world of hard and heavy music, while her pictures encapsulate the gravity and depth of life and, most importantly, death.
“The second gig that I was asked to cover was a black metal gig: Behemoth, Ancient Ceremony and some other bands at the Underworld. It was the darkest-sounding thing I had ever heard and I just thought: I’ve found home,” Ester recalls. “To me, it was the true sound of the devil’s music. There is this saying by Herbie Hancock that music is the tool to express life and for me, there it was like I had found the tool that expressed death. I was sold.” From there, she went on to work with some of the biggest names in black, death and doom metal, from Watain to Carcass to Cathedral, and not least for Metal Hammer.
But even though she discovered this musical realm of death and darkness only later in her life, the fascination for sinister, dangerous and rebellious art was always there and only fuelled by a Catholic upbringing in a household where music was rarely ever played. So, early on she discovered punk, goth rock, Use Your Illusion and Master Of Puppets, naturally gravitating towards things that did not conform to the norm.
“I think you have to have it in you to be able to recognise it, you cannot relate to something unless it is within you as well,” Ester states regarding her interest in the dark side of existence. “And I do believe that this shadow is present in everyone. Some people are willing to dig into it and go all the way, some people completely reject it in themselves and in any expression of it. How you relate to expressions of darkness has to do with how you relate to your own darkness.”
E
ster’s experience and interpretation of death and darkness is now impressively shown in Ars Umbra (‘The Art Of Shadow’), a picture book documenting her first 15 years in music photography, complete with testimonies from many of the artists involved. Working through a decade and a half of material – a total of half a million pictures of 2,500 different bands – has been draining for Ester, physically and mentally as well as emotionally. But while the choices that had to be made about who and what was supposed to be represented weren’t easy in the beginning, the book ended up finding its own way.
“Once the process started, it took me,” the photographer states. “I had a lot of ideas at first and they got lost on the way because they just would not fit. It’s been a process of constantly trying to be honest with the book and finding the true shape it had to take. Things just kept revealing themselves to me and ended up the way they did.”
Ars Umbra illustrates the connection between music and images – and reverses it: the book is accompanied by an original soundtrack to provide a rhythm and navigation for the visual experience: “The soundtrack was inspired by the ritualistic, tribal use of music, using percussion as a way of altering your mind,” Ester explains. “Music has that power, it takes you somewhere without your permission. I wanted the soundtrack to do that rather than be genre-based around any of the bands in the book.”
Fittingly, Ester Segarra’s work also has an almost ritualistic, spiritual character to it.
Her photography is a way of self-exploration, her camera a tool to find the true essence of her subjects. In scenes like black and death metal, where a certain kind of tough-guy behaviour and symbolic as well as literal masks are common, finding honest emotion is not always an easy task, though. In that intimate and vulnerable moment of having your picture taken, it’s all about trust. And that does not come only through professionalism but also through the ability to connect with the human beings behind every artificial image.
“I take people for who they are and how they come to me. Especially when I’m taking
“You have to have darkness in You to be
able to recognise it”
ESTER SEGARRA GOES THROUGH THE LOOKING GLASS
pictures; I am more open and interested in the person rather than prejudging and therefore acting according to my prejudgment,” Ester explains. That curiosity and openness to form her own opinion about even the most controversial subjects also led her to shoot Varg Vikernes, one of the most extreme personalities in metal. His place in the book is bound to raise eyebrows.
“I wasn’t going there as a judge, I was just going there as a photographer,” she explains, being well aware of his past and his worldview. “I wanted to see what happens. And he is in my book but he is not talking. I just present a picture of him for people to look at. It’s up to each person how they want to relate to it, how they want to feel about it.”
Simplistic judgements and a dualistic view of the world, of good and evil, are nothing Ester Segarra can relate to. Because most things are more complex than that and there are various, sometimes contradictory, sides to every story and individual.
“Just because someone has my respect and admiration as a musician, doesn’t mean they have earned my respect and admiration as a human being. That’s two different things,” the photographer clarifies, regarding the ambivalence of her profession. But one thing that always has to be there is a certain level of respect, something she can relate to. That’s when the ‘shadow art’ begins.
“My work starts with a black canvas, an absence of light. Then I bring light in and decide how much of it is going to come through, what parts are going to show and what parts are going stay in the shadow, in the dark,” says Ester of her aesthetic, which is often inspired by movies and paintings.
“When I’m thinking of photographing a band, I like to tell stories. So I think of what story the picture should tell and that kind of decides what comes out and what stays hidden.”
If music has the power to take you to different worlds and places, her pictures are meant to take you back there while looking at them – without falling prey to stereotypes and gimmicks.
“Symbolism is powerful when it’s an actual symbol of something. But when it doesn’t symbolise anything in the setting and is the void of an actual meaning, then it becomes a cliché,” the photographer says of corpsepaint, inverted crosses, pentagrams and the like.
This way of bringing the true nature of a person or moment into light while leaving everything else in the dark turns Ester’s pictures into something more than just promo shoots or magazine covers. They are gates into the unconscious and, in a lot of ways, legacies.
“When people go in front of my camera to be photographed, they’re standing there to do something that will transcend death. Because you capture something and whatever thing you capture could last forever,” she explains. “To me, it’s like a dance with three different elements: the person, the artist and the music. It’s about finding the point where they are all in tune. Where the person is in tune with the artist within themselves and the music.”
Even though she plans on easing up a bit on music photography, her countless shootings and the process of creating Ars Umbra also gave Ester insights into her own nature and relationship to her subjects. “To me, one of the great things about music is its power to connect. Music connects you to other people but also to parts of yourself,” she concludes. “In a way, this book turned out like that. It’s about connections. Endings and beginnings. A never-ending cycle.”
“Music takes You soMewhere without Your perMission”
ESTER SEGARRA ON WHY THE BEST TALES ARE OF THE UNEXPECTED