It was 1996 and I had just spent the year watching Beck create his cut up classic Odelay. We met up in downtown LA to shoot some possible promo pics. I had 24 exposures of black and white film and Beck had a cheap tan corduroy suit from the thrift spot. We met up on Broadway and decided to walk the length of it and see what we could get into. The Broadway of 96 was a slightly different beast than it is today. This was pre gentrification. No boutique hotels or bespoke breweries. All the crumbling movie palaces had turned to Jesus for salvation. But it was a great place to buy a cheap boombox or a fake social security card. Beck grew up less than a mile west in the Rampart / Westlake district so we weren’t exactly stealing shots for street cred. He’d saved up money to buy an off brand walkman from these very same shops as a kid. I had just discovered that my camera could shoot a second shot without advancing the frame so I decided to try some in camera double exposures. We knocked out one in front of a place called Jewels by Shawn. It sounded like Paul’s Boutique to me but Shawn was not impressed and told us to move along. A giant cell phone caught our eye and we snapped a couple more. Little did we know how that device would end up taking over our entire lives in a few short years. At the end of the street we ran across a group of gentlemen screaming through megaphones about the end days and UFOs. With my last exposure I finally captured a truly candid shot of Beck. End times indeed.
