When I wake up to an email like this, it can only mean one thing. Mark Kates is fighting outrageous gas prices or an interview with Jon Strymish is about to happen.

Interestingly enough, this email was from Jon Strymish and he agreed to talk to me. I met Jon before I met his photographs. I first saw him across a crowded room, pressed up against the stage at the Mission of Burma reunion show at Boston's Avalon in January 2002. I immediately noticed two things were unusual about him. The first being that he was photographing the band with the same Nikon I was using, the ancient and rare brick known as the Model F, as functional as a weapon as it is for taking pictures. I felt an instant bond. The second thing I noticed however, wasn't quite as heartwarming. He was standing in my spot.

As I moved closer to him he appeared to be sweating. I figured he sensed a wresting match was imminent in order to determine which of our Nikon F's would stand front and center. I moved in some more, and then I saw it. He had this very, very big...lens. It must have been very...uh... heavy.

Peter Prescott

Was he planning on photographing Peter Prescott's whiskers before they emerge from their follicles? Apparently so. I was in awe.

And if seeing Strymish work his lens isn't enough, there are of course, his actual photographs. Just check out Strymish's web site strymish.com and you can see his photos of Mission of Burma for yourself. And then there's the likes of everyone from Glenn Branca to Sonic Youth, Ann Heaton to Alix Olsen, Dave Alvin to Nini Camps, and Little Richard to Bitch and Animal.

I'm interviewing Jon Strymish on the heels of this summer's show in Jamaica Plain, Massachusetts. The show, titled "Watching in the Dark, D-I-Y pictures of D-I-Y artists," was featured at JP Art Market. The works displayed focused on the Boston music scene. The June 19, 2005 artist's reception also featured a performance by Binary System.

Jon Strymish's photographs are mostly of people. The images rely on available light, and many of the photographs are taken in a nightclub or at night, giving them an inherently personal atmosphere of light and shadow. Strymish often zooms in very close to his subjects as if boring through them, not just into their brains but into their souls, revealing their passion through his passion.

Clint Conley

"I think the close up thing comes as a way to get rid of the other stuff in the frame. I'm trying this year to pull out more and include more of the surrounding detail. As far as the black and white contrasty look goes, that's just clipped from the old jazz photographers. It's a look that I couldn't understand why it had been allowed to fade out. I'll take this chance to point out some of the greats that people might want to google for inspiration: Roy De Carava, Milt Hinton, and Ernest Withers, who can claim to have been a close adviser to both B. B. King and M. L. King. I think a pretty cool accomplishment."

Strymish's work definitely pays homage to these photographers, but he puts himself into the mix too, creating images that are very much his own.

"I think what I bring to my photography is a sense of composition and minimalism, I'm always trying to whittle the photos down to having as little extraneous stuff as possible, just a smile or a look in the eyes is what I'd like to get down, and if everything else can be dropped out, that would be fine by me. As for composition, I like simple, the simpler the better. I always think light in the middle (and) dark all around is the ideal."

And the big lens?

"I bought a 180 2.8 when I was in college, and it was my prize possession for about 15 years. Then I got a few years ago a telephoto 80 to 200 lens which I liked for a while, but have recently gone back to the original now."

Almost all of the work I've seen of Strymish's is in black and white? What about color?

"I'd like to do more color. I did a photo shoot with a folk singer named Josh Ritter in both color and black and white, and I really liked the color pictures. It was the first time I ever saw the value in it and am hoping to find some more people willing to let me try it. I don't think it can work for the performance stuff because there just isn't enough light, but for a record cover or a promo shot, you wouldn't have to ask me twice."

Strymish's passion began when his brother Dave and his friend Scott, while high school age, built a darkroom in the basement. "They sort of couldn't stop me from making a mess in there," says Strymish. "I always credit my brother for teaching me everything I know about photography.

Roger Miller

Once you get the basics, it's really simple, and you can hit on the question that really matters, 'What do I want to take pictures of?' From there it 's off to the races, and you can get more and more specific. I think the realization to me was that I wasn't looking for shots of a person, but that what I really wanted was to see the emotions that the person was going through. My brother's original instruction was (I quote his all the time), 'Figure out what you want a picture of, and make sure you can't see anything else.' Trust me, it's good advice."

"Ernest Withers has a quote, something to the effect that without faces there are no stories, but I don't agree with that. Lots of inanimate objects bear the marks of people who have touched them, and people so often use things as a tool to communicate. Can you imagine the hole Willie Nelson has worn into his guitar being anything but an expression of his passion for music and reverence for an instrument he's been partnered in making it with for the last fifty years."

"My first camera was a Pentax K-100, Dave brought it for me when I was probably about ten or eleven. It's mechanically almost exactly the same as the Nikons I use now, just basically an american copy of the early Nikons. My brother took me to the basement of an older man in our neighborhood, (Mr. Levine) who went by the moniker of Sam the Camera Man and had a little store set up in his basement with used equipment and parts for cameras of all ages. There must have been hundreds of little drawers, all marked with masking tape labels, the kind an engineer would sort little screws in. It felt very special at the time. Last year I discovered Levine's Cameras downtown in Boston, which has a great selection of used equipment, though it can be a little pricey, and realized that Sam was the brother of that Levine, and the experience made more sense. In those days cameras weren't ubiquitous like they are today so it felt really special to own one."