Daniel Coston - The Photo Guru in our Midst

In November 2001, music photographer Daniel Coston exhibited a body of work entitled "Hurried Documents: Five Years Adrift in Music & Photography 1996 - 2001" at Wrightnow Gallery in NoDa. QCM finally posted this piece to accompany Mr. Coston's fine exhibit.

The following interview with Daniel Coston took place in late October 2000 at Kelly’s Café in Charlotte, North Carolina. Here's an update of his past year!

How long have you been in Charlotte?

I’ve been here 17 years. Back in the early 90s when I was getting out of college I was kind of wondering what I wanted to do or what I was interested in, I would read stuff like the old IndieFile or the old Loafing and kind of hear about the bands here and there, but I never went out and saw them.

I went to college in Rock Hill, but I was still living in Charlotte. I went to Yorktown College in Rock Hill, so I had a one-year TV production course…

John Kelly stops by our table. I’m interviewing Daniel – I’m not sure exactly what he is but I know he’s a photographer so that’s part of the reason for the interview!

Daniel shares some of his photographs. When did you take the justincase photo, that’s pretty new, right?

That’s in May, I think…that was in July…this was August. That’s David Childers, took that at his house during a house concert. I don’t think I showed that to David yet. Photo of Hope Nicholls. That’s a couple years old, I took that back in the Sugarsmack days. That’s Lodestar, I had a spare of them. They’ve been around a long time, I thought I’d throw that in. Hey, Dave! Dave Rhames stops by the table. Daniel and Dave discuss the David Childers photo and an upcoming Westchesters gig at Puckett’s, which we all agree is a great new venue for the area!

So what is it you do?

That’s a good question. Right now I’m doing photography for music, but also odd things here and there; but also for the last year & a half I’ve been doing work with Charlotte magazine.

What kind of stuff do you do for Charlotte magazine?

Really anything and everything, everything from covering cultural events to doing a lot of architectural stuff, new restaurants they’re reviewing. I’m a regular freelancer there. I actually met the editor at a Lou Ford show, Mark introduced us. The editor at the time was also doing some writing for No Depression, and somebody said, “You know, this guy’s photographing all the shows that you’re writing about.” So he said “We need a couple new freelancers for Charlotte magazine, why don’t you come and join us?” I think I’ve surprised them and I’ve kind of surprised myself at how versatile I’ve been able to be with the photography, I think they thought it was just going to be more like bands, live shots, posed shots - but I’ve really shot anything and everything for them.

I went to college to do video work, at the time I wanted to be the great American filmmaker, I actually did a comedy show for local TV in high school and college for three years, me and a bunch of friends from high school. For a long time I thought I wanted to do that, I wanted to do comedy or some sort of writing or directing…but that group kind of broke up. Then once I got out of college I had trouble getting video work. Most of the jobs I did get always ended up falling apart. I had a streak going for like three years in a row where I lost a job every December. One was the day before Christmas, one was December 1^st which is the day after my birthday, the last one was the day of the Christmas party. It just had this great streak going. I knew there was something else I could be doing, I just had to find it.

So you were in that post-college searching mode?

Yeah, I was in that for a long time. Well, perhaps just for a year or two, but it felt long to me, a lot longer than I wanted it to be. Along the way I worked part-time at the old Mission Cable studios in Mint Hill. I worked there four month and hated every day of it. At that point I was just dealing with a lot of people who were dealing with their own frustrations of “why I’m not somewhere else” “why am I here?” and it was a lot of unnecessary things to deal with for somebody who was 21 years old. So after I quit that job I just decided to go freelance. At the same time I had met somebody who told me they were about to start a magazine called Tangents. And, I don’t know…I had always had an interest in music, I listened to a few bands here and there, but I didn’t really go out, I was too shy or didn’t know anybody, that held me back for a long time. The funny thing about Tangents is that the thing I originally proposed to them that I do was the one thing I ended up not doing, which was: cartoonist. I was a cartoonist in high school, I won a couple of state awards.

The first genesis of Tangents…we kind of met and talked for about nine months before we got the first issue together. The first meeting was December ’94, and then we finally got a dummy together like May, June of ’95. I was one of the people who was there from the beginning. We were all just making it up as we went along. The photography, later on, was like that.

Did you do photography in school, or was it just videography?

I was always really interested in cameras, or just photography as documents, and as an artistic medium as well. Even the few records that my mom and dad had I was always fascinated by the photography, the artwork…they had like the last couple Beatles albums, all the Stevie Wonder albums from the 70s – you know, tremendous artwork. These album covers seemed very mysterious to me when I was 4, 5 years old.

Do you remember the Beatles album that first really captured your imagination?

Abbey Road. Abbey Road, yeah. Yeah, you grow up on Abbey Road and you’re hooked for life, it’s just such a great record. I remember hearing that when I was four, and you really are aware of things in a different way from like four to eight, everything just sounds great, you’re like “Ahhh..! Wow!” Mojo magazine out of England just did this 20-page spread about the recording of Abbey Road – there were all these pictures by a couple of my favorite photographers, that I had never seen before! It was like part of me, that eight or nine-year-old kid was still in there, just like “This is so cool!” It’s cool to look back now and see, okay, these people did these pictures, these people did that, it happened at these time, during these sessions…I’ve always been interested – even before I was interested in photography, I was interested in photographs as a document. When I was ten or eleven and my parents moved me down here I got interested in family history and later got into the photos that my parents had kept. I was really lucky, and in ’93, my grandfather was moving out of my grandparent’s old house and he had a box of different photographs and he said “Whatever you want, go ahead and take.” I started pulling up negatives – I started pulling up OLD negatives, like 1930s…I realized that they couldn’t afford to print most of the pictures. Fortunately my grandmother not only kept the pictures that they did print – she kept the negatives. So there were like 60 years of negatives, most of which no one had ever seen before. There are pictures of my grandfather in World War II, color photos taken by my mom’s family…and I had the good sense to grab all of that, so I kind of ended up being the archivist for my family even before I was doing photography.

I can remember the first concert I ever went to which was the Beach Boys, New York State Fair…one of Dennis Wilson’s last shows. My dad brought his camera…it’s like, they won’t let you bring a camera into anything now, anymore, unless you’re there as a photographer. So it’s amazing to think about, here’s my dad in the middle of the New York State Fair, taking pictures…with the same camera I have now, actually.

You have more lenses and things like that for it?

Yeah…the more you get into this technically, you can get too technical and detract from the image. No matter what camera you’re using, what lens or the situation, the image has to come first. I’ve always tried to be cognizant of not getting overly involved with the minute technical details.

Clearly you had an early interest in photography. When you were growing up, what did you think you were going to be?

I wanted to be everything. I wanted to be a spy, then a baseball player for the Yankees. Baseball was a big thing for me in high school…being a bit of an introvert, I kind of fell into collecting…I’m glad I did, collecting back then was much different that it is now. Things were so much more available, a lot less expensive and it was great if you were into older things… I was buying Ty Cobb cards, Babe Ruth cards, old stuff from the 20s and 30s because that was what interested me.

Where did you grow up?

I grew up in Seneca Falls, New York. Very rural, a really good place to grow up, beautiful scenery… the rest of my family, my parents and my sister, still live up there. Upstate New York in winter is so beautiful. That part of my memory has never changed…memories of being nine or ten playing in snow that was this high ( gestures several feet above floor). Mostly the area we were in near the lake, lots of people were only around during the summer. The rest of the year my mind was able to go nuts, try anything…I just thought I would be creative, I figured I was not going to have a normal job. Ever since I was little, the creative realm was the one thing that I knew I could do and do well. I was drawing for the other kids in class by the time I was nine, and the response that I got from that really opened my eyes. I was sneaking some photos in here and there, I know that a couple of the photos from the Beach Boys show were mine because they were way off center! When I got to my first quarter of college photography, I was shooting more for the teachers so it didn’t really hit me until later. I did sports photography and sports writing for a paper in Matthews for about five years (it was good for gas money). By the time Tangents had come around I was writing a fair amount and was seeing the work in print, getting an opportunity to learn and improve it. Except for the bare essentials, I’m self-taught.

Do you now consider yourself a writer, a photographer? A critic, a journalist?

Good question…one of the things that got me more into photography was that while I liked the feature-writing for Tangents, the other stuff I could do, like being a music critic…reviewing music for a living didn’t interest me. I didn’t care about my opinion, I cared about music I liked, I cared about getting people’s stuff out there, but I didn’t want my opinion to get in the way of the other work, which was the feature writing and later the photography.

People have gotten to know me so much as a photographer, but I don’t always want to be perceived as a photographer…I don’t want it to define me. There’s still a lot more work to do with the photography, there still a lot to do in terms of getting the work out there and improving the work, there’s still a good ways to go…other creative diversions can help keep a person from focusing too much on one aspect of their work. We all need some things that go away from our main creative focus, so you don’t get that feeling that you are trapped into doing the one thing.