Flea has a new podcast called “This Little Light”, on which he interviews a broad range of people from the music industry such as Patti Smith, Earl Sweatshirt, and Rick Rubin, thus mirroring his own diverse taste in music. When Calvin Alagot asked me to make portraits of Flea for the Los Angeles Times, I began thinking of different techniques that I could employ in an effort to reference the breadth and length of Flea’s career as well as his influence in the music world.
Conceptually, the idea for this image sprung from a trip I’d recently made to Northern California. While I was there I visited the Redwood forest and I observed the tree cutting of a fallen tree that was thousands of years old. Seeing so many rings of varying width got me thinking about what might’ve happened during the years where a trees ring was especially thick. My thoughts then drifted to the human life span and the growth and change and external influences we experience through our lives. If, for example, we endured a year of trauma or experience a year of peace, how might these experiences get recorded to our DNA? If we were to get biofeedback scan of our brain or have our aura photographed, what colors might we see, and would this be the human equivalent to tree rings? To take this a step further, I thought about the color spectrum and specifically how red, green, and blue light can be combined to create “white” light. By deconstructing light into its separate channels and having them sit in an image side-by-side, this would both look like rings while also giving a nod to the different genres of music, which have both unique characteristics and some overlap with adjacent genres.
To illustrate these concepts I decided to make in-camera multiple exposures, comprised of three exposures. For the first exposure I lit Flea with green-gelled lights (I chose to use green for the center to reference his youngest self). After making the first exposure I swapped out the gels to red and took another shot (my Canon 5DIV allows me to to see each layer of the exposure when shooting in Live View, making it possible for me to precisely compose each frame within the overall exposure). Finally, I made the outer layer, using blue gels (a color commonly associated with wisdom or peace). The image of receding, rim-lit profiles is also a visual reference to the Rolling Stone’s album cover for Hot Rocks.
I want to thank Flea for his patience and willingness to let me do my thing, and Calvin for his trust and creative freedom.
