HERRING & HERRING? MORE LIKE SH*T & SH*TT*ER!

BY STEFFAN CHIRAZI

HERRING ONE

Photography team Dimitri Scheblanov and Jesper Carlsen are tired yet congenial. An end-of-day cocktail is in the cards, having just spent the better part of this July day (and the previous one) shooting Metallica’s forthcoming album cover art, booklet images and promotional portraits at the band’s HQ, and it has been a busy one. Not that they’re complaining.

They smoothly lack fluster, indeed you’d have to look hard for signs of their fatigue, but you know the hours they’ve spent and you worry about taking up too much time. They each assure you, one after the other, that it is no problem whatsoever and that there is plenty of time, no worries, and so you accept their sentiments and settle down to ask questions, placing yourself between them. Later on, you’ll consider that technically this might not have been the smartest thing to do, but you’ll also reflect that subconsciously, you wanted to split them up, to put distance between them as you all chatted. Perhaps you even find them a tiny, tiny bit intimidating? No, surely not? For these two men, this photographic team, are as friendly as you could wish for, these two men who share the same name for professional purposes (Lars has spent too much time pondering who is Herring one and who is Herring two).

They are not, as their name might suggest, twins. Or even siblings. In fact, their working name is something of a red herring (don’t pardon the pun, it was intentional). Dimitri Scheblanov and Jesper Carlsen come from Russia and Denmark respectively, and having met on a fashion shoot some eight years ago (and subsequently enjoyed working together enough to form a creative partnership) they settled on one shared national element as their identity. Herring. And Herring. You’ll find plenty in both countries. The name is also democratic, with no Herring greater than the other, carrying the parity of (as Scheblanov observed) a band name.

Some of the celebrities they’ve worked with include Beyoncé, Oprah, Ozzy Osbourne, David Byrne, Hilary Swank

I had first met Scheblanov and Carlsen at Lars’ wedding some 18 months ago, and in future meetings have found both unfailingly polite yet brimming with huge personalities kept respectfully, and neatly, under wraps. Scheblanov, who was born in Russia, lived in Moscow along with Rostov-on-Don and moved to New York in 1991, is a warm, engaging raconteur whose manner suggests he could slip effortlessly from discussion about renaissance art to Formula 1 to nasty habits to politics without a gear remotely grinding. His eyes sparkle with a twinkle of mischief, and he has a mustache which, if it isn’t waxed, absolutely suggests it is. Carlsen, from Denmark and who cryptically chuckles that his childhood was “spent in a Turkish prison,” is quieter, a tad more circumspect, yet relentlessly polite. His eyes carry an investigative quality as if he’s politely measuring all aspects of you, and he is devilishly dry-humored. On his left arm is a tattoo of his dog (So What! approves wholeheartedly), and as you spend more and more time with both of them, it is clear that their creative relationship is superbly balanced as their personalities fit perfectly with each other.

Herring & Herring have worked with a wide-range of commercial and fashion world clients, and they also publish their own magazine, Herring & Herring Magazine. They largely get to choose who they want to work with, especially when it comes to the magazine where it is theirs and theirs alone. Some of the companies they’ve worked for include Gucci, Playboy and Nicole Miller. Some of the celebrities they’ve worked with include Beyoncé, Oprah, Ozzy Osbourne, David Byrne, Hilary Swank and now Metallica. Their own personal creative influences differ widely. Scheblanov speaks warmly of liking Gilbert & George, whilst Carlsen tries steadfastly to avoid looking at any photographer’s work, but will admit that “every photographer likes Helmut Newton.” It is yet another snapshot which explains how the various notes in their personalities manage to find enough space to maintain themselves and enough congruence to work effortlessly as one.

An important thing to note here is that Scheblanov and Carlsen are massive, massive Metallica fans. They play Metallica and Mot?rhead at all their shoots (So What! can testify to this), Scheblanov loves “One” and Master Of Puppets, Carlsen loves “The Four Horsemen” and Kill ‘Em All, but both tell me that it is “fucking hard” choosing one song or one album. So really, when you weigh everything up, having Herring & Herring shoot the cover art and booklet images for Hardwired…To Self-Destruct made perfect, congruent sense.

The results we have seen thus far speak for themselves. The actual album cover is a twisting, writhing mass of raw, savage emotions, at once screaming and roaring and kicking and punching, expressing a semi-dysfunctional inner-rage that is wholly appropriate with the music it is representing. It actualizes Metallica as one creature, one “person,” a hybrid (or as Scheblanov and Carlsen refer to it, a “Frankenstein”) beast loudly expressing all the feral traits of life. Then there are the “solos,” where inside each band member sit the hopes, dreams, frustrations and aggravations of each other, crawling around inside their relative thoughts. It carries (for this writer anyway) the weight of vintage 16th-century medical illustrations, but viewed through a very modern and artistic prism.

As you’ve doubtless gathered, the first part of our conversation occurred after the initial shoot, and once the band announced the new album (and unleashed the art), it was clear another conversation would need to happen. This occurred after the Minneapolis show. But let’s start with the initial conversation…

Steffan Chirazi: Let’s start with some basics. What happened? How did you guys meet?

Dimitri Scheblanov: How we met? So we got together eight years ago, and there are two stories of how we met. The short story is we met on a project. Jesper was the photographer and I was art directing. And the actual project was a commercial project. It never wound up really going anywhere, but we really hit it off. I think that sense of humor thing is something that we shared, and we just liked hanging out, we thought we should do something together. Jesper wanted to do an editorial, we shot the first editorial, it came out kind of really fantastic…

Jesper Carlsen: …yeah, and it was actually using the same kind of technique as we just did for the [Hardwired…To Self-Destruct] cover. Like those projections.

DS: So yeah, we did that and then one shoot turned into two, turned into three, and then we just both felt, “This is working really well, why don’t we commit to each other?” And just working together, not working with anybody else outside of this. And in the beginning, we were really just experimenting, and excited about coming up with fresh ideas in every shoot.

SC: And you got together in what we would call a “digital” world. No darkroom. No printing.

DS: Right. I took photography in high school, and that was my first foray into the creative thing and then I quickly got out and got into film and got into sculpture. Then I was in advertising.

JC: I don’t ever think about photography when we’re not working.

SC: So are you slaves to technical excellence, or do you believe that you can get a great image even if maybe the light isn’t quite right but the emotion’s there?

DS: We probably differ in that.

JC: Yeah, we differ because I’m more of the technical guy. I like to get the lighting correct, if we lack one style and we want to do the same one, I want to be able to reproduce it over and over again. Dimitri can sometimes do some blurry pictures. I don’t like these, but he likes them.

DS: I do, yeah, because I go more on feel. And so if it feels right, if it feels cool, I like that. Jesper likes it sharp.

JC: I’m also a nerd!

SC: I know that “discussion” having worked with art directors over the years, so in that pantheon of discussion, how does it usually end up? I mean, do you agree to split the difference? How do you sort that out?

JC: You can always see it in the end result once you start putting the story together. If the softer or the blurry picture actually ties into the overall story, or not. And if it does, by all means, put it in.

DS: We obviously get into disagreements about stuff and we try to argue it out, try to prove our points.

SC: Which is fun, right? That’s a fun part of the creative process.

DS: I would say that’s not the fun part of the process.

SC: But isn’t it like a marriage? You trust that you can go in there and get swinging with each other, but you know that you’re not gonna divorce over every argument.

JC: Right. But then we [also] have Kelly [Scott – the Herring & Herring studio manager whom the two refer to as the “ampersand” in their name – ED] and we’ll say, “Okay Kelly, what do you think?” So she then has a third vote, and that typically tips the scales.

SC: Was there one project which solidified the working relationship to where you knew it was going to work long-term?

JC: I think for me it’s been more like where we have made errors. There have been shoots where I shot in the beginning, then I forgot to set the correct camera setting and we’re shooting into jpeg instead of into raw files.

SC: How do you recover that?

JC: Well, my heart stops! We didn’t recover from that, but we always found a way to make it work afterward. It worked out for that project; I think it was gonna go on a frisbee anyway.

DS: You learn. That’s the other thing, you [just] learn, especially in the beginning. I think we’ve been in a good groove for a while. But in the beginning, it was a lot of…

JC: … stupid mistakes…

DS: …discovery and failures. But they were also great because you learn from them. All of those experiences were shitty but super valuable. And we, I think, appreciate them a lot because it’s gotten us to, you know, to the point where we’re at.

SC: Everyone thinks that anyone with an iPhone can take a picture, but you don’t get things like lighting and resolution, which are true barriers between a casual photograph and something that is actually gonna work for a multitude of professional reasons, right?

DS: At the same time, you have people who are technically incredible, but they can’t take a picture!

JC: A lot of those people, they’re also not comfortable with other people. They’re not comfortable with speaking to the subject, connecting with the subject. It’s a humongous [part of this]. And that’s another reason why it’s nice to be two, because sometimes Dimitri connects better with the subject than I do...

DS: …and sometimes it’s the opposite, yeah.

JC: Yeah.

SC: You obviously shoot famous people. It seems to me that you must pass (ordinary) people in the street, or see people around in your daily life, and you’re like, “Jeez, I’d love to do a shoot with them?”

JC: I don’t ever think about photography when we’re not working.

DS: Yeah.

JC: We never have a camera on us.

DS: We don’t take pictures on our cellphones.

JC: We don’t do any of that. For me, I’m saving all that energy for when we’re actually doing the pictures.

SC: And you can control it.

JC: Yes.

SC: You don’t walk by and sometimes just see something, and then think, “Holy shit, I want to take a fucking picture?”

JC: Sometimes I see something, but then we turn it into a concept. And then we sell it to a magazine or something like that. I never [just] start “doing it.”

SC: That’s actually very, I mean, that’s both very controlled but it’s also very smart.

JC: But I also think that that’s our personality; we’re not those kinds of people who just run around and ask strangers in the street, “Can we take a picture of you?”

DS: Well, I was gonna say that when I was in school doing sculpture, there were sculptors and painters and photographers, you know, whatever. I never even went up to the photography floor because I always found, like, a “disgust” with photography? The idea that somebody “feels” through their lens [that] they see something that nobody else does, I think is crazy! It just seems really insane and really pompous, you know? It’s a really strange attitude. So for us, we are never looking at something, or someone, being like, “Oh, we’ll capture it like this.” For us it’s like, “What’s the idea, let’s design...” We don’t just shoot. We storyboard everything. We make lists of stuff. It’s very “process” oriented in that respect. And it all comes out of an idea. So everything is anchored in an idea. We never walk around and “see” inspiration that way. But we might be reading the news, or seeing an old advertising picture in the 1940s, and we’re like, “Okay, this is really cool,” and then we take that and we build stories or whatever out of that.

SC: Interesting. You work very conceptually. It’s not about free flow then, it’s a concept all the time.

DS: Absolutely, yeah.

SC: So how many concepts can you take on per year would be the question I have.

DS: Oh, my God!

JC: There is no limit whatsoever. It’s exhausting to come up with them, but yeah…

DS: …we have folders and folders of stuff that we collect, you know, that we drop into the folders and then we figure out later.

JC: Yeah, we collect pictures every day. We’re always saving something.

SC: So now we should talk about the whole Hardwired…project and concept. Were you given material to work with? Did you see any of the album art? Did you see any lyrics? Did you hear any music?

JC: No.

DS: We saw some concepts that they were looking at today [which was the actual shoot day – ED] at lunch. I’d heard about the title. But that was it. We haven’t heard any of the music.

JC: But the whole thing with the projections was from Lars’ wedding.

SC: Let’s break that process down.

DS: Yeah. Well, so yeah, so basically when we went out to the wedding Lars asked us to do anything we wanted. So we came in the night before everybody and we did a shoot with Jess and Lars…

JC: …in their garage.

DS: At their house. And that was the conceptual portrait thing. We had done the series a few times where we take a picture of a subject, and then we project that photo onto either that same subject or a different subject. And so you get this, I think we were describing it to Lars, something like a very controlled double exposure.

SC: Yep. I gotcha.

DS: And in between that process, we take that first original image and we kind of “paint” it in Photoshop. And so then when that is projected onto the next image, first there’s a “confusion” of who you’re looking at, because when the faces start lining up or whatever it’s hard to tell what that is, and then the colors that come in make it even more…I don’t know. It’s not “trippy” but it’s – ah, maybe trippy!

JC: Yeah, it depends on the colors.

DS: Yeah, depends on the colors.

DS: So we thought [about] something really special just for them, and it’s maybe cheesy or corny as it may sound we thought, you know, there’s a union. Why don’t we take pictures of Lars and project ‘em onto Jess, and take pictures of Jess, project ‘em onto Lars, making a single image of this couple? So we described it just as we did to you to them, and they were like, “We don’t know what the fuck you’re talking about but okay, do whatever you want.” So we set up this tiny little thing in their garage and went through the project and started doing it. I think we were shooting it at, like, midnight or 1:00 am or something.

JC: Yeah, it was pretty, pretty fucking late.

DS: And Lars asked, “What is this? Where did you learn [about this]?” We said we made this thing up. That this is like one of the first photo shoots we did together, and he said, “This would be an amazing album cover.” We said, “That sounds nice.” And he goes, “How many combinations can you make with four people?”

SC: So he was on it?!

DS: Oh yeah.

JC: Well, we were also drunk at that time...

DS: Yeah, yeah. We had had a few.

SC: So you thought you were drunk at that time but here you are. So I’d like to point out you weren’t as drunk as you thought you were, because you’re here and it happened! I know what you’re saying though.

SC: So how does the work break down between you two? I mean in terms of clicking the button and then framing, then in terms of the post-production, do you take turns?

JC: Well, D does all the post. Simply because I’m not a Photoshop whiz, so that’s his.

DS: Yeah. So [for example] yesterday, the prep images… I took the portraits, went and painted them, and then today, Jesper took the pictures [with] the projection, while I manipulated the projector and kind of bent it around and made these “things.” And then I’ll do the post, which is actually not that much, because everything is really done in camera.

SC: And when did you first discover this technique? You said it was the first piece you did?

JC: In the beginning, instead of projecting faces onto other people, we actually projected clothing onto nude models. At that time everybody was doing background projections. We wanted to do something different. So D came up with the idea of projecting clothing onto the nude girls, which was a pain in the ass lining up the clothing with a projector in a dark room…

DS: No, it was not a fun process.

JC: We had never tried it before, so we had to go through all the settings, what’s working, what’s not working, it got very confusing why something was not working, the whole trial and error process. And we swore never to do it again!

DS: We [also] did a personal project where we did nudes. We shot nude men and nude women and then projected onto the opposite sex. Which came out awesome.

JC: Fantastic, yeah. Fantastic.

DS: And we love those. They’re some of… they’re probably our favorite pictures, yeah! It’s because it’s really confusing. You have this girl with tits, and kind of smaller tits, and you’ve got this cock…and double nipples and then the face also, I mean it’s all together and it’s just super trippy and looks really, really cool.

JC: But again, we swore never to do them again every time we did them. But with magazine editor[s] asking for something, like, special, they would ask for these pictures. Ugh. Do it one more time…

SC: Interesting. So you don’t want to get nailed for that as that being your thing, but by the same token it’s fun and you enjoy it.

DH: This is the last time!

SC: Let’s also talk about the magazine, which is where you first met Lars a few years ago. First of all, you are both based in Brooklyn

JC: Yeah, we’re both from Brooklyn.

SC: How much traveling do you think you guys end up doing per year? Is it like being on tour?

JC: We try to do as much as possible in New York…

DS: …but we’re basically between New York and LA. And when we work for other clients, you fly out for a few days and then you’re back. When we do our magazine it’s two weeks, two and a half weeks in LA and pretty brutal.

JC: We like to pack everything and like to work. Then we go back home, do the retouching, put the magazine together. That’s another two months of work there.

SC: And the magazine comes out on what schedule?

DS: It’s really whenever inspiration strikes.

SC: That’s an incredible freedom to afford yourself in the world of publishing these days. How do you manage to achieve that?

DS: To do it?

SC: Yes, absolutely.

DH: Well, the whole magazine came out, I don’t know, not by mistake, but it wasn’t… we weren’t intending on making a magazine. What happened was we had all these ideas that we were really passionate about the magazines we were shooting for weren’t going for. We did a commercial job, made a bunch of money from it and decided to take two months off and just do all the stuff for ourselves.

SC: Brilliant.

DS: Just shoot all these pictures.

JC: We needed to get it out of our system. The ideas were so fucking good, they needed to be executed.

DS: So we shot it and we made this “promo” magazine, something just to send out to potential clients, existing clients, that kind of thing. We made a website for it, and on the website, we had a section where you could request the magazine because we had videos and then previews of some of the pictures. We got a bunch of requests, so we thought, “Let’s make another one!” I mean, if people like it, let’s make it. So we sent that original one to a distributor. They loved it and they said, “Okay, tell us whatever you want and we’ll put it out.” So that’s how we’ve been going, and we have a new distributor now and they get what we’re doing, that it’s not a typical magazine. I mean, there’s no text in the magazine. There are no interviews, there’s no anything! It’s just our pictures! And it’s not a huge; it’s not a 500,000 copy run, so we have a bit of freedom to decide when we want to put it out. So when we have time that we’re not shooting for clients, then we go and we have to line it all up, which is the thing that’s the most difficult, arranging for all these people to shoot.

JC: The cool thing now is that all the celebrities, they’re starting to reach out to us and want to be in the magazine.

DS: Which makes it a lot easier than when we started it.

JC: It’s fucking fantastic, and because we don’t do traditional photo shoots, they want to do it. They normally do boring magazines and this is more fun.

SC: With all that said, with all the storyboarding and planning, you’re still reliant on making that initial “human” connection, though. That’s the soul of it, right?

JC: Oh, yeah.

DS: Absolutely. I mean even with the pictures [of Metallica] today, the parameters are that it’s a white background, it’s a person, and it’s a projection of a person onto the other person. Everything else is really left up to chance, what the guys decide they want to express in their face or in their bodies.

It’s interesting, we’ve shot Lars a couple of times now and I think I’m very comfortable with him through our friendship. But we’ve never worked with the other guys before. And all of them were a lot of fun. Totally different personalities, different ways of doing everything, and I think we got a lot of that in there. And the other cool thing was that if somebody’s maybe a little bit more somber in the pictures, the thing that we’re projecting onto them is a crazy image. So you do get that interplay of those personalities really kind of mish-mashing and really becoming this “one” image that all four of these guys are making together in a way, even though they’re not there at the same time. It’s cool.

At which point our initial HQ conversation ended and the much-discussed cocktails were enjoyed (doubtless deep into the night). This next conversation happened only a few days ago. With the cover art everywhere, and both Scheblanov and Carlsen having enjoyed the extra (and unforeseen) bonus of seeing it projected some 100 feet high on the giant live stage screens when the band performed the song “Hardwired” for the first time ever in Minneapolis, emotions were still somewhat buoyant.

Herring Two

It is a week after Metallica severely tested the glasswork in Minneapolis’ US Bank Stadium, and I have called Scheblanov as he walks to a store in New York. I offer to call back when he has arrived back at his home, but he cheerfully disregards the idea, saying it might actually be better to multitask. Both he and Carlsen enjoyed a fulsome 24 hours in Minneapolis, which concluded with them missing their flight after post-show socializing with Ulrich, falling asleep standing up at the airport and then reflecting on what had been a thoroughly unique experience. Scheblanov found Carlsen on the phone, we all jumped aboard and the conversation began. One thing that became clear to me was how discussing the cover art was a lot easier now that I had seen it, thus certain aspects of their process are re-explained in a more succinct form.

SC: Was that the largest, most impactful rendition of your work you’ve seen?

DS: I would say so.

JC: I would say so without a doubt! It was fucking fantastic! I had tears in my eyes when I saw it, so it had a huge impact. We were in the Snake Pit and stayed until the bitter end.

SC: When you see your work that huge, that immediate, are you able to sit back and enjoy it or are you immediately in “critical” mode, seeing things you’d like to have changed and whatnot?

DS: The whole thing with going to the show started earlier in the week when we were talking with Lars about some things and he mentioned it’d be a cool idea to get the projections up on the screen. So we knew we would have to go to see that, and also to take pictures of it simply to have a record of it as it was a huge spectacle and a huge deal for us personally. So when they first started flashing [up] we were trying to take pictures, but because it was panning so quickly left-right-left-right, we just gave up, stood back, jaws on the ground and really tried to enjoy it as much as possible. Everyone was incredibly excited, as were we, so we did end up enjoying the spectacle maybe even more than other fans. We were awestruck. We also had this “countdown” because we had a setlist and knew where it was meant to happen, so there was this “countdown” to the moment where you hope everything goes well!

SC: Was it cool to get instant feed-back in Minneapolis from the fans you ran into? Was it a relief? Does it matter?

DS: It absolutely matters in some ways, and not in others. We had prepared ourselves for a lot of negative comments, knowing how fans can be. The first time we shot Lars for our magazine, somebody from Metallica had posted the cover of the magazine onto their Facebook page. We were very eager to see what people were saying, and we ended up bursting with laughter because one was more over-the-top negative than the next, towards Metallica, towards Lars, towards us, it was sort of insane how negative people could be towards the band they “love.” One criticism stayed with us because it was so funny. Somebody wrote “Herring & Herring? More like Shit & Shittier,” which we loved! So we were expecting more of that stuff, and were very, very pleasantly surprised by both the comments on Instagram and the Metallica website blog parts, the fan forums, and Facebook too; it was overwhelmingly positive. And when we were actually out there, I guess our photo had been posted earlier in the day from the pop-up store, we had people coming up to us in the street, which was really wild and something we hadn’t had before. The positivity was there for whatever it was, the full 33 hours we were there, and also getting the positive feedback from the Metallica camp and management and everybody else…it felt great! Had it been negative it wouldn’t have been so bad because, ultimately, we really like the work ourselves and it wouldn’t have affected how we viewed the project. But obviously, the positive feedback was great.

SC: Sometime between the time we spoke at HQ and Minneapolis, the decision was made to release in November. Were you already “in process” or did you have to drop everything and jump on it to get the work done?

DS: No dates were given to us. We had no idea. We did it, we left. We started re-touching the week after we got back [from HQ] and yes, then there was a rush. The first we knew of a date was when we saw the web skins because that had the date on there, and even then we didn’t know if it was a fake date, because they were being so secretive about everything, so we didn’t know the release date until everyone else did too.

SC: Looking deeper into the actual cover image, and subsequent “web skins” images we’ve seen thus far, there’s one image where Lars is screaming inside James’ head which was particularly striking for various reasons! Did you pick up on their respective chemistries both individually and with each other?

JC: The first thing Lars said was that he had always wanted to be inside of James’ head!

DS: Obviously knowing the history of the band and the guys, we had some understanding of the evolving dynamics and relationship between them all, so we looked to get a range of different emotions from them during the shoot. Which we got: the angry, the quiet, the frustrated, the more somber, we tried to get a range of emotions to have some breadth to it. Once you see the booklet and all the other art, you will see there’s a lot of different images and so to only have “screaming” would be boring, a one-note kind of thing. Our thing was to capture the totality of emotions.

SC: How were they on the day of the shoot?

JC: They were awesome to work with, no issues whatsoever with them. It was more on our side, us holding back because it was so warm that day that the equipment kept on breaking down, so we fell a little behind from time to time but other than that it was perfect…

Indeed it has turned out to be. On paper, you would’ve been forgiven as a Metallica fan for perhaps questioning why this “Herring & Herring” who have never shot a rock band or never created “rock’n’roll” artwork, why this Scheblanov and Carlsen were doing the art for Hardwired…To Self-Destruct. Yet here we are. A quite brilliant sleeve, some marvelous images revealed and a whole lot more to come. Once again, we get to enjoy another creative journey undertaken by the band and one of their chosen emissaries, and once again it is clear that they got both the journey and destination right. It feels as though we will be seeing a lot more of Herring & Herring in Metallica’s future.