How Dave Matthews Band Tour Photographer Sanjay Suchak Meshes His Two Loves
A portrait of the artist at work. Image by Jeff Coffin.
For Sanjay Suchak, a perfect moment is elusive: it’s hard to predict, hard to describe, but he’ll know it when he sees it. As the tour photographer for artists like Dave Matthews Band, Public Enemy, and Slightly Stoopid, Suchak documents incredible live concert moments like this unexpected one of Dave Matthews and Stevie Wonder holding hands. Suchak is always looking for moments like these, whether he is on the road with the band or photographing celebrities like Mike Tyson, Tony Bennett, and Tina Fey. And Bernie Sanders, John Lewis, and Madeleine Albright. And poet Charles Wright.
Yet photography wasn’t exactly the career he had envisioned for himself. From a very young age, Suchak witnessed first-hand what an oppressive government can cost a family. His father had emigrated from Zanzibar to escape upheaval on the island, and Suchak decided he was going to work in government and public policy. He studied political science and international relations in college, and went on to work in Congress. Everything was going as planned. That is, of course, until his love of photography which was ignited by the old Nikon film camera that belonged to his mother, pulled him away. And wow, what a camera can do to change someone’s life.
For years now, Suchak has been taking photos of the greats. And in 2020, against all odds, he found himself inside police lines in Richmond, Charlottesville and across the Commonwealth of Virginia, documenting the politically fraught removal of Virginia’s confederate statues. The democracy-loving kid inside him never went anywhere, afterall. He just managed to find a way to combine the two important pillars of his life: photography and politics.
Here, Suchak takes us inside the process behind how he works, including a photograph that changed his career; how creativity is an exercise that you can practice everywhere (even in the shower); and why he believes that borrowing like an artist is critical for mastering your craft, no matter what stage you’re at in your career.
The Stevie Wonder and Dave Matthews photograph that changed Suchak's career, taken at the Concert for Charlottesville in 2017.
I. Life on the Road
Tell us about the photo that changed the arc of your career.
I had been working with the Dave Matthews Band for a while, but I wasn’t always the photographer, I did video work and other things. There was a benefit show in Charlottesville in 2017 where Stevie Wonder came out and sang “Superstition” with the band. At one point, Dave and Stevie held hands on stage. I kept a little camera on my hip, because, first and foremost, I consider myself a photographer. So I snuck around behind Dave and Stevie and took a picture of them. I printed out two copies and the next time I saw Dave, I said, “One for you, one for Stevie.” And he said, “You know Stevie is blind, right?” That turned into a hilarious conversation. But that act of printing the photo and bringing it to Dave put my photography on his radar, and led to me having this role going forward. Everyone, even a famous musician, is human and if you can capture a meaningful moment and share that with them it is a great kindness.
What are some of the juicy details of being the photographer for a rock and roll band?
The thing about the juicy details would be the lack of juicy details. It’s so much more tame as a touring photographer than the movie Almost Famous would lead you to believe. Every artist I work with is pretty much a normal person and they take their job, the performance, quite seriously.
What is the best part of being on tour?
The best part for me is the rigid schedule. It’s like being in the military, but for creative misfits. You don’t have to decide what to wear or what to eat or where you're going, because that’s all decided for you. All you have to do is focus on the task at hand, which for me, is taking photos and editing them. That unrestrictive space to be creative is a huge gift.
First thing in the morning on show days, I edit the shots from the night before. Typically, I’ve already made my selections as I shoot the show. For each show, I send the management team about 100-150 photos with 60 or so selects that I’ve chosen for social media. Then, after I finish my edits, I’ll take a walk around the venue we have just arrived at and get a feel for what we’re looking at that day. After lunch I typically turn around a quick social video as well as pop into the band dressing rooms to photograph preparations for the show. There’s not usually a flurry of activity until about 6:30 p.m. when everyone coalesces after dinner. Then it’s work time for me to shoot the show, and I am constantly looking for moments until the band leaves the stage after the show. After the show, I dump the memory cards to my computer, pack up my gear, shower, and repeat!
The joy and passion Dave Matthews feels playing music is captured on camera by Suchak.
II. From Safe to Wild: Inside His Creative Process
What is unique to your work process?
I think in scenes, like a play. Even while documenting a concert or protest I think ahead of time about how things might unfold and try to work toward perfecting those scenes. As a result I keep copious notes on each band I work with, their songs, how they move on stage, and what the lighting cues are.
The other thing is what I call the “spiral.” I work in a specific order for every shoot. I identify the safety shots, establish them first, then work my way outwards of the spiral getting drastically more wild and crazy with my ideas until I have exhausted my creative ideas or I sense with my subject that it’s a good time to stop. Knowing when to say “I’ve got enough” is one of the greatest strengths you can develop as a photographer. I attribute most of my continual increase in celebrity portraiture work to knowing that I’ve got the shot and saying “that’s a wrap.”
What does the perfect shot look like to you? And how do you get it?
I don’t know if the perfect shot exists, if we are speaking of a universal idea of the perfect photograph. I definitely think there are great shots and even perfect ones given the situation. For me, my favorite kind of shots are ones that have a great sense of symmetry and focus. The ones that keep your eye contained inside the box.
So I think a more obscure answer is to reference the book Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance. It’s about philosophy, not so much about motorcycles. The author sets about to define subject and objective excellence and settles on the word “quality”: it’s hard to describe, it’s often elusive, but you’ll know it when you see it, more importantly you’ll know when something isn’t it. And I sort of feel like that about my photography. It’s hard to describe, but it’s perfect for the moment and you just know it when you see it. That said, I am always trying to improve and I sometimes look back at work from years before and think to myself, this is no longer quality work.
You take shots of the same people, in the same setting, night after night. How do you keep your creative process and work fresh?
I think of creativity as an exercise, like any other exercise you do in the day. Whether you’re someone who works in a creative field or consider yourself just a “regular person”, creativity is a pretty valuable part of your day. I would encourage everyone to have some sort of creative act to get their mind flowing.
A great example of this is my brilliant friend, the author and reporter Lulu Miller, and she once told me she gets in the shower in the morning and thinks about the origin of a word, and all the ways that the word could have come about. And when she’s out of the shower, she looks it up and sees how close she was, or if she had just come up with something crazy. An exercise like that can become an integral part of your day, and I think it makes your life better, kind of like exercising or eating.
For me, I often spend time breaking down a scene in my head into more and more granular parts to try and look at it a different way. If all else fails, I encourage folks to draw a random card from the Oblique Strategies deck.
Where does your creativity come from?
For me, creativity waxes and wanes. It’s kind of a circular process that comes from everywhere and I have to be inspired by other people’s brilliance. I don’t directly steal ideas, but I use something about what they say or what they paint or photograph or write that gets my brain thinking. It kind of is a circular process. It comes from everywhere.
If I am feeling stuck, as a creative exercise I like to reinterpret what’s already been done. So I will see a photograph or a painting and reinterpret it my own way through photography. I don’t publish it. It’s just for myself. However the tools and ways that I’ve challenged myself stay with me so that when I am presented with a situation in the future, I can call upon those things I learned from “covering” someone else’s work to solve my own creative problem.
In that spirit, this playlist I made for Creative Factor is full of 20 really unique musical covers by some quite famous people. And I think that’s important to remember; that even famous artists reinterpret other people’s work when they need a little spark. Through this process, I definitely learn new skills, such as new styles of lighting, new ways to expose or play with light and camera settings. And in the process, I’m figuring things out. And then those new things I learned will go into whatever I do later, you know.
Suchak gets up and close to his subjects, even those as intense as Mike Tyson.
Can you give us an example?
I’ve definitely used my learnings to differentiate my concert photography and portraiture work. For example, I’m sure you’ve heard of Richard Avedon’s In the American West, where he does portraits of every day people in white sheets with a large format film camera. And I liked how simple and basic they were, and I started doing portraits of friends like that, but mine didn’t look the same as his. So I did these portraits on film in a completely different way, by using an Instax printer and then peeling the edges. Somehow it all started to look organic. Yesterday I posted a picture of Mike Tyson that I took really close up with that style and the film peel. It looks nothing like Avedon’s work — I think it looks organic — but the border idea came from him. It serves to contain the eye.
Where did you get the idea to do this?
I first got the idea from watching all these bands. If you go see the same band enough times — or in my case, hundreds of times — you’ll notice that the energy often picks up when they cover someone else’s song, because it removes the self-consciousness, I suspect, about the songwriting and the content of the song. It’s just about the performance. And so I thought, Well, if that picks up their energy and lights a spark, then maybe it can do the same thing for other artists. For me, I don’t share it with an audience, but I think there’s probably a case to be made if you're creative to share it, as long as you are clear about the attribution of the idea. In general, I think personal work like this is the most important work that you can do. Every creative person should try to make time for it. As you get more successful in your career, you lose that time. This is my reminder to try and make that a priority.
Public Enemy's Flavor Flav and Chuck D, photographed by Suchak.
III. The Non-Linear Career Path: From the International Relations to the Arts
How did you get into photography?
Right after I graduated college, I was in Upstate New York, in Buffalo, and I saw a listing for a photographer that needed an assistant. And I had always liked photography. I had my mom’s Nikon film camera from when she was in college. And I was like, All right, this sounds like fun. I don’t have a job at the moment. I linked up with this photographer, and he did higher education marketing photography, which was kind of cool. He was based in Toronto. He kept all his gear in the U.S. because of customs, and so every Monday, I would get on a plane and fly to some small college town. Together we traveled the country to all these small schools taking marketing photos that would blanket mailboxes across America for kids who just took the SATs. We would take photos of the perfect balance of students sitting in the library around the quad or whatever. And he taught me lighting, composition, client relations, all this stuff. It was very valuable. I'm very appreciative of him, and I did that for six months, and it was really cool.
But then I got a job in Washington, D.C., working in my field. So I was like, Hey, gotta go. Gotta actually use my major now. So from about 2006 to 2013, I worked in D.C. and government, nonprofits, that whole space. But working in Congress is not a financially lucrative endeavor, despite being very rewarding, so I left to work in nonprofit agencies. But during the time I didn’t make much money, I found that if I gave my photos to a music blog, they would give me free tickets shows. So I would just take photos of concerts for free in exchange for tickets, and then at some point, a community college in Maryland had an opening for a photographer, and I just applied for it on a whim. I had a portfolio that was, I guess, good enough and I’ve been a full-time photographer since then.
Suchak covered what happened when the statues came down in Charlottesville, including Robert E. Lee's head.
Tell us about your personal project, photographing the Confederate statues in Charlottesville?
In 2016, a local Charlottesville high school student started a petition to remove the Robert E. Lee statue from the park in the middle of town. It caused a bit of a reckoning in town on whether or not these statues represented our collective values, and it turns out that they absolutely didn’t. As a result, Charlottesville City Council voted to remove these statues, and that set off the firestorm, which brought the violent and deadly Unite the Right rally to Charlottesville in 2017. So all that is like the nucleus of this project. Growing up in New York, you don’t grow up with this legacy of the South looming over me like people here in Charlottesville did. I think, honestly, my Civil War history lessons in school were a week long. It was pretty glossed over and whitewashed, so I didn’t really understand that these statues were erected a generation and a half after the end of the Civil War to intimidate and repress the Black community. But now, being a part of this community, it was like, Oh, wow. This is kind of a big thing to have a southern town and move a Confederate statue.
Prior to all this, I had worked on a project with this construction firm, and they ended up managing the removals.. And so I badgered the owner until he let me come along with them to remove the statues. So I was on the inside of the construction crew, like bulletproof vests, hard hats, meeting at secret locations, and I just started documenting the inside story. And once I had access to a few, I realized, Why not get them all? So I would find ways to get access to them all coming down. Then, I photographed where the statues ended up, like in a storage area or against the trees alongside the highway, or melted down. In the end, there were many, many photographers who were documenting this process, but my project became quite a comprehensive look at the removal of Confederate statues in Virginia, because as far as I know, I was the only one who was allowed inside the police line.
This personal project during the pandemic parlayed into a staff job at a university, being a Practitioner Fellow at the Karsh Institute of Democracy at the University of Virginia, teaching about protest photography and democracy. You never quite know where your side projects are going to take you. I’m not going to say that protest photography was my passion before I started, but everything kind of fell into place.
Have you always been passionate about democracy?
Yes, but I never really thought I would be working in that sort of space. But my father is an immigrant to this country. He came here after a revolution in his home country, which was Zanzibar, a part of now Tanzania, and I saw what that upheaval and lack of representative democracy cost him and his family. I mean it was atrocities that are akin to the genocides that are happening right now in the world. I went to school for political science and international relations, not photography. I was going to be a diplomat and work in government to change the world. Then I changed. I pivoted. But I’ve always cared about making sure our elected officials stay on the right side of things — the correct side of morality, perhaps.
How do you view the different chapters of your career path?
There is no straight line between “A” and “success” in any career, in my opinion. It’s okay to take several detours and to get to where you want. My parents stayed in their jobs their entire lives, and that’s frightening to me. I think because of that, I was much more cautious. For now, I'm a freelancer. I work for myself and have this fellowship, but I could have made this career jump years ago. It probably would have been better, but I was very cautious about it. So I think everyone should do what they want at their own speed. But also it’s important to remember that the myth of the “full-time artist” is a relatively recent invention. If you look at famous artists back in the day, they often had day jobs, so nobody should be ashamed that they have a day job too. And social media has made things worse, like when you're looking at everyone and not seeing the boring stuff they have to do, just their success, How is this person just living their best life? If you look at me, it appears that I have this amazing life, just traveling around, going to concerts, and taking photos. But I also do non-glorious shoots that pay the bills. I’m thankful now that I solely work in photography and video, but it wasn’t always that way.
On the side, you have to make the art that appeals to you, and not focus too much on turning it into a career. The career will come to you eventually if it’s right. Someone who might seem like an overnight sensation to you usually has about 30 years of work under their belt already, which really shows that success is not linear. When you start having a couple bits of success, they’ll start multiplying on each other. It builds on top of itself. Don’t worry too much about the ebb and flow. That’s life.
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