THE BOXER REBELLION
By Adam Docker
Behind the scenes at SS22 Studios, Southend
I recently spent some time with The Boxer Rebellion at SS22 Studios in Southend, documenting the band as they worked on their eighth album.
There's something quite special about being invited into that creative process. Watching a simple chord structure develop into something far more powerful over the course of a day. Ideas being exchanged, melodies taking shape, arrangements changing, sometimes through the smallest adjustments. By the end of the session, something that hadn't existed that morning had become a song.
It was a real privilege to witness and film that process, particularly with a band whose music I've admired for so long.
Between filming, I took the opportunity to capture some stills. I wasn't particularly interested in photographing the sessions in a conventional, linear way. I wanted the images to have a sense of movement, as though they were coming from somewhere and heading somewhere else. Something a little more ethereal, where moments overlap and time feels less defined.
I experimented with slower shutter speeds, allowing movement to pass through the frame, combining that with the available light and deep shadows of the studio.
In many ways, I wanted the photographs to reflect the band's music. The Boxer Rebellion have this extraordinary ability to build from something intimate and restrained into a huge, expansive sound. There's a sense of space, movement and emotion in their music, something that feels equally at home in a small recording studio as it does filling a stadium.
I wanted to find a visual language that captured a little of that feeling.
Not simply photographs of musicians making music, but something of the music itself.
