The First Saint

He was twenty-one years old when I photographed him at the Commodore Ballroom. He had five more years to live and didn’t know it. None of us did. That’s not what made it sacred — but it’s part of why I keep coming back to those frames.

The first three songs of any show belong to the photographers. We line up at the barricade in the dark, count down with our cameras at our faces, and then the lights hit and you have maybe ten minutes to find something true before security taps you on the shoulder and walks you out of the pit. You don’t get to listen to the show. You don’t get to feel it. You’re working. The music is what you’re hearing through somebody else’s monitor wash. The artist is what’s between you and the strobe.

Most nights, that’s fine. You leave with a card full of images, you cull them in the morning, you post one to Instagram and file the rest. You forget which show was which after the third one of the week. The work runs together. The artists do too.

Some nights are different and you can’t tell why at the time.

On not knowing what you have

The thing nobody warns you about in concert photography is that you are sometimes documenting the last record of someone in their living body, and the only person in the room who doesn’t know that is you. Everyone in the future who looks at the picture will know. The artist doesn’t know. The fans in the crowd don’t know. You don’t know. And then, years later, something happens, and the frame you almost deleted becomes the only thing of its kind in the world.

I had a frame of him laughing. Just laughing, between songs, looking at someone offstage I couldn’t see. It wasn’t a concert photo. It wasn’t sharp enough. The lighting was wrong. I marked it as a reject in 2013 and moved on.

I do not think it is a reject anymore.

What the fans do

If you spend any time in the Mac Miller corners of the internet, you will see what I mean about canonization. It is not metaphorical. Every September 7th, the playlists come out. The lyric tattoos. The tributes that have nothing to do with selling anything — just people, alone in their rooms, listening to Swimming and writing into the void about what he meant to them. The relationship is not parasocial in the dismissive sense of that word. It is something older than that. It looks a lot like devotion.

The relationship between listener and artist had become something much older than the song.

And the artists in this genre, in particular, seem to invite it. They write like they know they’re confessing. They reference their own deaths casually, frequently, sometimes prophetically. They make records that are clearly addressed to the version of you that will need them later. When the loss comes, the records are still there, waiting. They knew you’d come back.

This is not normal. Country has its dead. Rock has its dead. But no genre’s dead are quite as present as hip-hop’s. They keep releasing posthumous albums. They keep appearing on features. The voice is preserved in such high fidelity, in such recent technology, that there is no era of grain between us and them. They sound like they could walk into the room. Sometimes it feels like they have.

What I was doing in the pit

I was twenty-something. I was working on something I didn’t have a name for yet. I had not yet found the things that would later structure my life. I was, in a way I would not have admitted to anyone, looking for something through the viewfinder that I knew was bigger than the picture.

I think I was looking for what the fans were looking for. The same thing. From a different angle.

You point a camera at a person who is doing the most concentrated, vulnerable, true thing they will do that week, and you try to catch the moment when their face stops being a public face and becomes the actual one. That moment is the entire reason for concert photography. Not the spectacle. The gap in the spectacle.

When you catch it, you have a record of something that the artist themselves rarely sees. You have a thing the family doesn’t have. You have, in the frame, a private moment that was made in public, by someone who didn’t know they were making it.

This is, I am realizing as I write this, very close to what an icon is supposed to do.

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Why he’s the first

I have photographed maybe sixteen hundred shows. I have lost more of those artists than I can list cleanly. Mac is not the first I lost. He is not the most famous I lost. He is not even the one I knew best, which is a complicated word for “knew at all,” which I didn’t, which is the whole point.

He is the first saint because he is the one whose absence reorganized something in me. The phone call about his death — I remember exactly where I was standing. I remember the temperature of the room. I remember the specific way the news traveled through my circles, faster than news usually does, with a kind of disbelief that wasn’t really disbelief because we had all been afraid of this for months. The fear had a shape and he wore it on his sleeve and we all knew, and then we all pretended we didn’t know, and then he was gone.

I went home that night and made an account on a music platform under a name I’d never used. I uploaded a mix. It was nothing — it was bad, it was unfinished, it was a single track called “Mac Miller Mix” that I made because I needed to make something and I did not know what else to do with the feeling. I forgot about it for seven years.

The feeling did not forget about me.

The work I am doing now — all of it, the photography that came back to life, the writing, the music that finally exists under a different name, the thinking about devotion that this site is for — none of it makes sense without that night. He is the saint at the beginning of a sequence. He is the one who, by leaving, made the work I’m doing now possible. I do not feel good about saying that. I do not know what else to say.

The shape of the canon

This site will add saints over time. Some will be obvious. Some will not. Some will be artists whose deaths reorganized scenes. Some will be living artists whose fans treat them, already, like saints in the making. Some will be archetypal — the Saint of the Cypher, the Patron of the Demo Tape — figures who stand for what the genre’s devotion has built around. The point is not to maintain a death cult. The point is to look at devotion, in all of its hip-hop forms, with the seriousness it deserves.

But the first saint had to be Mac. There was never anyone else it could be.

For me, anyway.

You probably have your own first saint. You probably already know who they are.