Bonnaroo 2006
Bonnaroo 2006 was my first trip to The Farm and only my second music festival assignment.
A few months earlier I had reached out to Superfly Presents with an idea to shoot VR content at the festival, something I had never seen done before. I figured it might be enough to get my foot in the door and to my surprise, they said yes.
I arrived in Manchester with my VR gear, a Nikon F100, a Hasselblad XPan, and a bag full of film - and absolutely no idea what I was doing. I spent the next four nights sleeping on the grass next to my car, which reminded me of sleeping in a foxhole during my time in the Marines.
It was a big year for Bonnaroo. More than 80,000 people descended on The Farm, and much of the anticipation centered around Radiohead's Saturday night headline set. The festival was still young then. There were no smartphones, no real-time uploads, no endless streams of content competing with the moment itself. I miss those days.
Because I was new and largely unknown to the festival, I wasn't granted an all-access pass. At the time it felt like a disappointment. Looking back, it was probably the best thing that could have happened. Instead of spending four days on stage or in the photo pit, I wandered.
I explored campgrounds, vendors, back roads, and the temporary city that emerged there each June since 2002. I photographed Bonnarovians making their annual pilgrimage, first-timers discovering festival life, and the strange beauty that appeared in the spaces between performances. Bonnaroo felt less like an event and more like a rite of passage.
The musical highlights were easy to find. Radiohead's Saturday night set ran nearly two and a half hours and drew from every corner of their catalog — widely considered one of their best performances, ever. Tom Petty. Sonic Youth. The SuperJam featuring Trey Anastasio, Mike Gordon, Marco Benevento, and Joe Russo, with Phil Lesh sitting in.
Midway through the festival I got a few minutes above The Farm in a helicopter, looking down at the full scale of what 80,000 people assembled in a Tennessee field actually looks like — the grids of tents stretching to the tree line, the stages like small islands in a vast sea of humanity. One of my favorite images I've ever made came from that flight.
Twenty years later, the photographs I return to most often aren't necessarily the musicians. They're the people, the campsites, the moments between moments.
Bonnaroo 2006 was the beginning of a fourteen-year relationship and the beginning of my understanding of how I wanted to photograph music festivals. The search for atmosphere over spectacle started to come into focus that weekend.
The music brought me there, the culture is what I photographed.
Sonic Youth
Tom Petty
The Superjam featuring Trey Anastasio, Mike Gordon, Marco Benevento, and Joe Russo - aka G.R.A.B.
The Giant Zippo
