Photo: instagram.com/neilkrug/
Krug’s images have a discernable style and texture. With vibrancy and ambiance, they show personality and flare. The skill in these images is that they also allow the subject’s personality to shimmer, without clashing with Krug’s.
His illusionary filters and effects are slipped in and around the subject (as most filters are), but the interesting thing about Krug’s images is that his subjects are icons in their own right. His musical muses are the likes of Lana Del Rey, Foals, First Aid Kit and Bat for Lashes aka, Natasha Khan.
There is a tone to her music that creates an ethereal distance between her and the listener. There is a sense of space between entities, an almost visible void that could be somewhere, if only we knew what to call it and how to find it.
These images of the singer that Krug shares are intimate and extracting, in the same way that Del Rey’s voice is when she tells us a secret from the past through song. They take their inspiration from the music, in this way, the two art forms create a mirroring effect, disseminating the same divulgences as one another.
When considering the images of Bat for Lashes and First Aid Kit, these artists seem delicate and unreachable, as if frozen in a lucid dreamscape enveloped by the scorched colours. It isn’t often we are given the opportunity to experience images that feel this intimate, especially when seeing them on a glass screen.
Though the all-male Foals are portrayed in the same unmistakable Krug style, it is not their femininity that is striking but their confidence in their vulnerability and rawness in contrast to the often vivid palette.*
This mirroring, common in Krug’s work, offers a new experience to the listener and moves them away from this previously singular way of experiencing an artist. There is a shift, another way of understanding the music in conjunction with the image in a sense that approaches Barthesian semiotics. Further than this, these images practice multidisciplinary desires and an integration of music as a concept, musical icons, photography and beauty to exist in one space without conflict.
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