A look inside of “Nine Inch Nails, The Downward Spiral Exhibition” Interview with photographer Johnathan Rach

L: Mr. Rach, I know that you photographed Nine Inch Nails during The Self-Destruct Tour for The Downward Spiral. That album covers drug abuse, rejections of society and God, self harm and overall pessimism. Did the themes of that album and tour affect the way you approached photographing the band?

J: My introduction to the music was through the documentary right when the album came out. That's how I heard the music, through live experience and documenting. I had a very unique perspective being in the immediate entourage of it all: five band members, a bodyguard, the tour director, and myself for three years. So that's how I experienced the music. I would say what influenced me the most was access. Obviously I had access to every show at any angle. I wasn't restricted; dressing room, on stage, but I was also living it with them, and I was living it with Trent as they did their performances. I'm in that tour bus, airplane or whatever, and I'm with them. It was true. It was raw, it was real. It was more than just on stage. It was the real deal. Because I had so intimately seen this show, the performance experience, the songs, I started to Capture my friends. What resonated for me was being able to capture what was happening on stage, the rawness of it all. So that was the only test of what to take a picture of, was the intensity or the sparseness of it. It had a lot of dynamics that went from extreme angst to kind of despair, and I'm seeing moments in the performance that really calculate despair. I would try and capture those. I saw moments of angst where friends were playing the keyboard and would start destroying it. That makes for the other end of the dynamics. I was privileged to be in that position so many times, to keep trying to search for those shots that just seemed to magically appear. There's aesthetics, but more than aesthetics is emotion. “Does this feel right?” “Do I feel some sort of emotion in this image? Is it true to what the music was, what the message was?” A lot of times, some things were not perfect or blurry, or not framed correctly or the quality was a little off. But if it was hitting those important categories and it was something that seemed to resonate for me, it became part of the collection at the gallery. 

L: It seems that the emotion conjured at the time is what inspires the more formal elements. Whether it be angle or specific subject, lighting, etc. Not that it's like “I have to consciously set all these things”. It's just that if something feels angsty, feels full of despair, angry, whatever it might be. And it’s just an attempt to capture that in the moment?

J: You kind of turn your brain off. And you're just kind of on another level of subconscious, you know? You're just kind of like “The performance is happening.” You're almost gazing at it. Something feels right over here. You take a picture. You got to frame up. Got to exaggerate what's going to accent the energy that you're trying to capture at the right angle. Then you're being flown. You have no control over the subject, the lighting. You know how fast the image is moving. You control none of it, and everything there is so proper. You even get those action film situations where there might be too much fog on stage, there was a lot thrown at it. And again, having access to products and things is one thing.

L: I have photographed Korn, Gojira, and some hardcore bands before. It’s the same for me: you have control over literally nothing. If I'm doing still photography, I know this person isn't moving. Shutter speed be gone. But [concert photography] is just chaotic. It's really just thinking on your feet and trying all sorts of different things, and for me personally, just taking as many photos as possible.

J: Yes, yes, yes. The focus here, as you know, is the performance and that particular time. And you know, music history, what that tournament was at that time, what it means now, you could have all this skill set that we're talking about, but it's something that 25 years later is not really relevant. The real gift is that Trent's still relevant. He's grown as an artist. His music is still edgy. It's still resonating, connecting with people again. I'm lucky again. My subject ended up having some kind of effect on the society of music and culture. So it's just like, this just doesn't happen for photographers. And then the crazy thing is these photographs, because they were not my main focus out there, they were something I was doing on the side while I was doing the documentary. They go in one big box, and they sit in that box for 25 years. Like, when does that even happen? No one saw these for 25 years, until Steve and Kelly saw a few online. I literally never even opened the box for 25 years; they collected dust at my mom's house. 

L: That was actually a question I had. From my understanding these are lost photos? How did the process of them becoming un-lost happen? 

J: You know, they really had no purpose. Back in the day, they weren't part of the documentary, they weren't part of the book. The internet didn’t exist. There was  no “yeah, okay, we got all these photos. We're gonna do it.” I think it was just me being protective, because I saw them and handed them over to Trent while working on the documentary in the studio. I think the box was just kind of sitting there. There was no need for them. There was no home for them. So I just decided “Well, let me box these up and send them to my mom's house where they would be safe.” And, you know, yeah, they just uncovered. 25 years later, COVID hit. I went back home to take care of my mom. This is in Pennsylvania, and I just remember being on tour with Nine Inch Nails, and I was very young. I was in my early 20s. I remember they would give us T-shirts and some things like my itinerary, my tour book, some clothing. Whenever you're on tour, you can't gather things, so you have to send stuff back home. And I just was like “You know, I'm gonna search for these photos.” I even said to my mom I was like “I sent boxes.” She's like, “Oh yeah, it's in the basement under the steps.” 25 years later i’m digging through all these boxes thinking that I'm going to sell these T-shirts, you know? I know that they would come up on the tour bus and show Trent prototype T-shirts to see if he liked them or not. And they would hand them out to everybody on the tour bus and I held on to them all, and eventually would send them back to my mom's– really bad bootlegs, you know, the security guys would come up and say, “We got to see these T-shirts”. And we would all get one, because it's a joke. There were horrible bootleg T-shirts. So I was like “Yeah, I feel like I got some really cool collectible T shirts there, and I'm going to sell them on eBay 25 years later.” And because they were relevant, I saw people were buying them for pretty good money. It was looking for T-shirts that I discovered all these photos, that's how they came up and then I wanted to sponsor them to become an exhibit. Steven sees one or two of them posted- I think I posted five of them, and there are hundreds of them. He said “Do you have more?” And I said “Yeah, I've got hundreds of them.” What started with eBay ended in an exhibit in New York, Los Angeles, and if I'm to understand, Australia, soon, Sydney, Melbourne, London, Tokyo.

L: Wow. You get to go everywhere.

J: It's awesome. This is ridiculous for a photographer to experience this kind of attention, you know? So the fans have been coming out and, I mean, this has been amazing. Just all so kind. Everybody's just been amazing. The sweetest, kindest people, man, it's really been incredible.

L: I'm thinking about that point you made earlier about how the subject of your photography- this band- has become so elevated into alternative culture that it's, enhanced the value of the photography and the fact that you did it. My whole life, I've grown up with this band. My dad played them in the car, he’d play the soundtracks. They're my most-streamed artist ever. I get real sentimental value for the band, therefore it increases my sentimental value towards your work as well. 

For one non-Nine Inch Nails related question, actually, I saw you made an independent film with Matt Stone of South Park. I have not been able to see it yet because I just found out about it, but I definitely want to watch it soon. I want to know, how was your approach to independent, non-documentary filmmaking? I know Closure was a documentary. Documentaries are a bit different, filmmaking-wise. Walk me through the process of narrative to execution to post. Was there anything that you did differently than usual in the kitchen doing the written film?

J: Yeah, the documentary stuff gave me confidence. I was like “Oh, this is just going to be like, doing a documentary, but it's going to be scripted and going out, discovering the content as it's unfolding in front of me. I'm going to write the content and have what I need to unfold in front of me.” It was just like I learned in a documentary: audio is everything. It sometimes enhances to have the visual not all be there. But when you can't understand dialogue, you have nothing. So I wanted to take no shortcuts with the guy who captured the dialogue. I just knew that you can't cut corners there. I made sure that everything's sharp and clean and looks like it was a high audio production, and then just writing scripts. They are two different creatures for sure. Documentary film may end up doing written scenes, but the documentary gave me the confidence to think it's just the same thing. It's just a little different. When you're doing a scripted movie, you have to block out. I didn't have that in my schedule, because you don't block anything when you do a documentary, yeah? So, my director of photography was like, “Can we block these scenes out yet?” And I'm like “Yeah, come again. What?” And he's like “You know, block out. Like, you got to have your actors walk through what you get to do, so I know where to put the cameras.” And I'm like “Oh, okay, yeah!” I'm not used to that. As a documentary guy, I just walk into the dressing room and everybody's doing their thing. I just select what I'm going to pick. So that was a lesson learned. And then getting people to act - that's not happening in a documentary. Not at all. Now I will say this much: I did learn. Sometimes I’d go into a dressing room and nothing worked. Other times everything worked. And so I started to realize that there's an energy that you're capturing, and sometimes it's not there, so you've got nothing. It was really important to understand the energy of what you're filming. And so, I tried a lot of times, especially with the low budget, I said to the actors “I only have a budget for one or two takes.” So they really woke up. There wasn't any laziness going on where. If you know you have 10 takes, you kind of think “Okay, we'll get it. There's, like, 10 safety nets here.” I'm like “No, if you don't give a great performance in two takes, you're gonna look bad on camera in film.” 

L: That goes to like a small aside I had, which was in the filming of Closure. With such a long tour, so many openers and dates over the span of two years. How did you condense that? 

J: I had five hours that I needed to get to, like an hour and a half. 

J: Well, the whole package is three, one cassette was all music. Yeah, so together, the whole entire thing was three hours. But I think the running time was under two hours. I knew that I was filming because I knew I was gonna have hundreds of hours of live footage. You just capture it, and then you kind of go “That's a dumb thing.” But behind the scenes, if a dressing room or a moment was really good, I filmed my hand at the end so that I had a visual marker when I was scrolling through the footage. I created a folder. They had all the hand moments, which are like the best moments that I thought of as I was witnessing them in real time. And then you have kind of your structured story to start selling it with. Like what's the best one or two, three moments to help drive that? And then it's just the process of elimination, once you kind of get down to your favorites that's pretty much it. It's just a lot of work. There's a term that they call "Killing your babies,” like something you really love, and just doesn't work for the narrative and doesn't drive the story for it. You just have to get rid of it. 

L: Yeah, definitely. It sounds like, at least with me and my film friends, we experience that. You start with your favorites, you fill it in your skeleton: your favorites that are also ordered to the narrative. Then everything else you unfortunately have to chuck, which is just part of the process of making art. Especially film and music. I just have one more question, and that is, what is in the future for Jonathan Rach? 

J: Oh, thanks. Film feature, just like we talked about: making feature films. That's my passion. I love that, so that's what I plan to work on in the future. I write scripts and get the funding and shoot the film and edit it, putting it out for people to experience. That's my focus.

- Landon White, Johnathan Rach