By Dana Klosner-Wehner
But when the sun goes down, the 12-year Baldwinite makes his way back to Long Island to photograph the local music scene, focusing on capturing the emotion expressed by the artists.
“Five Copies For My Mother,” a collection of Bromberger’s music photography, is being displayed at the entrance gallery of Briarcliffe College in Patchogue throughout April.
In each of his pieces, Bromberger said, he tries to capture a musician who is lost in the music. “When a musician is really into it, he kind of forgets where he is,” he said. “He stops being human and becomes music itself. Most of my work captures that sort of moment of creation. The music becomes a part of their soul, part of their being.”
As a child, Bromberger said, he dreamed of being a musician, but joked that he never had the time to practice. Instead, he developed a love for photography, but in a rather unusual way. While he was a graduate student studying biology at the City College of New York, he took a class in photomicrography, for which he photographed cells through a microscope.
Bromberger began taking pictures in the early 1990s, but didn’t keep it up. In 1997, he moved from Brooklyn to Baldwin, and began taking photography classes at the New School and the Camera Club of New York, both in Manhattan. For one assignment, he had to take pictures of his friends, and it was then that he began photographing bands.
On display at the Briarcliffe exhibit is a photo of a guitarist playing his heart out with his eyes scrunched closed. There is also a photo of vocalist Laura Press, singing with the band Wonderous Stories, lost in the music, her arm stretched high and her eyes closed. “[Bromberger] uses a lot of color and emotion,” Press said. “When you go through a great song, it’s like a gymnastics routine.”
There’s a photo of Eddie Havoc of the band Mediacrime, playing guitar with his arm stretched high and his mouth frozen in an “O.” “[Bromberger] froze me; I don’t know how he did that,” Havoc said of the shot. “He gets into the music and becomes a part of it.”
Bromberger said he gets to live vicariously through the musicians he photographs. All of his photos are of Long Island bands, and, he said, the Island’s music scene is huge. “For every one Billy Joel there are 100 working musicians,” he said.
He takes the time to get to know the bands and the venues where they play, he explained. “It’s my personal belief never to go out to a new club and photograph on the first night,” Bromberger said. “It’s like trying to write an article when you don’t know the language.”
For the Briarcliffe show, Bromberger chose the 12 best photos out of some 40,000 he has taken in a little more than 10 years. He chose pictures that were technically sound — no shadows over subjects’ faces, for instance. He looked for portraits that were good enough to be chosen for an album cover. “Out of the 40,000, you end up with 50 nice shots,” he said. “Out of those 50, you pick the ones that really grab you.”
The final 12 had real intensity, he said. He judged them by the energy of the performer. “Every performer has his own style,” Bromberger said. “Some bowl you over with intensity, some with grace.”
When he is shooting, he said, he is always looking for a good angle. In the smaller bars and clubs, it’s easy to get up close, but in larger venues, like B.B. King’s and Grille in Manhattan, he is forced to stand back by the bar.
Wherever he takes pictures, he said, he gets there before the band starts and stays after they’re through, so he can go backstage and gets candid shots. He estimated that he will shoot as many as 3,000 pictures on a Saturday night. Some weeks he’ll shoot two or three shows.
“This show is very refreshing,” said Briarcliffe curator Lisa Cangemi, who showcases a different Long Island artist in the gallery each month. “I got e-mails and calls from students, faculty and staff.”
Bromberger said he is generally not too outgoing, but feels that his photography is a way of expressing himself. “I need a way to show people what I see and feel and hear,” he said. “This is my way of communicating without words.”
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