by Marina Carresi
My husband’s favorite group are James and they finally came back to Madrid in 2007 after several years absence. I like the band very much but my English isn’t good enough to understand the nuance of their poetic lyrics. They were going to play in a big festival with other groups in a town near Madrid. It was summer. As you can no doubt imagine summer in Madrid is extremely hot but it didn’t matter to us; James were finally going to be in Madrid again! So we took a free bus put on by the festival organizers to get to the place. We were working in the magazine Think in English at the time and I wanted to take my professional camera with me but in the end Nick convinced me that it would be a problem getting it past security, so I took a very small camera I had back then. We arrived at the venue and after the usual queue and bag searching, we got in. Just as we were looking at the stage and thinking about how we were going to get a place in the front row, we heard, “Hi, thought we might meet you here!” It was Jose and Lola, friends of ours back then. We were catching up with them when I told Jose, “It’s a pity I don’t have my camera (at that time my camera was almost an extension of myself), I only have this tiny little one but anyway I’m going to try to take some photographs.” I can’t remember how I mentioned that Nick and I had press ID cards. Jose got excited, “You should get into the press area.” He knew about these things because he had worked in radio, and music is his passion. So we got into the press tent and had a drink. It was much cooler than outside under the sun. We were excited and nervous, we didn’t have any press passes but the worse that could happen was we might be ejected, so we stayed there acting as if we had been doing these things all our lives. Then the concert was going to start and we all left the press tent. The photographers began to take up position in front of the stage in the pit. Suddenly, Jose pushed me and I found myself surrounded by the biggest cameras I had ever seen and then with my minuscule camera I decided ignore my fears of been expelled and take as many photographs as I could. The concert began and ‘we’, the photographers, were only allowed to take photographs during the first two songs. The cameras started to flash and suddenly I think out of amazement at seeing this red-haired woman with the smallest camera you could imagine in the press pit, Tim Booth – the singer of James – stared at me quizzically. This is the photograph of this moment and I love it. A few moments later, a security man ordered me out of the photographers’ pit but I didn’t care because I had my photos.
This is one of my favorite photographs because I had the courage to take it, I had found the confidence to take a risk and it was great fun.
marinacarresi 