Former R.E.M. frontman Michael Stipe has a new book of photographs that looks at the wild and wacky world of digital media.
The book, titled Our Interference Times: A Visual Record, is the second in a series of diaristic publications put out by the Italian publisher Damiani. Whereas the first entry, Volume 1, found Stipe revisiting his early archives to compile a portrait of his years with R.E.M., the new book takes a more conceptual approach, focusing on the awkward junction where analog picture-making meets digital technology.
“My boyfriend tells me I have no hierarchy of image,” Michael Stipe told the New York Times last month. “I’ll see something and think of it as insanely beautiful, and it might be not at all something that would attract a regular thinking person. And I’ll put it next to something from Versailles—to me, they make sense together.”
Stipe tapped his longtime friend, the novelist Douglas Coupland, who is credited as a coauthor, to winnow down a group of some 3,000 photos into the 190 or so that made the final edit.
“He knows me, and he knows my work and the way I see the world really well. We’re very close friends, and we’ve known each other for 30 years,” Stipe told the Times.
The book offers a smattering of mostly unresolved shots, including pixelated pictures of old prints, phone snapshots of architectural oddities and studio assemblages, plus video stills and computer-rendered portraits. Although it is a disparate group of subjects, pattern do emerge.
Moire—the rippling visual effect that occurs when you photograph a screen—is a steady fascination of Stipe’s, and instances of nature interacting with the human-made world are everywhere. Stipe is especially good at photographing security cameras and insects.
See more pictures from Our Interference Times below.