The Vinyl Project

The Vinyl Project, a project meant against discrimination. For a long time I wanted to create art with something I had found about the musicindustry in the 50’s and 60’s.

Discrimination in the musicindustry

For who hasn’t seen the documentary about the famous soulsinger Sam Cooke on Netflix, let me explain you a little. Discrimination towards black people was really high in these times, especially in the USA. Sam Cooke could be super famous, but going into a bar ordering a coffee was a difficult thing to do actually. He had to wait longer, or wasn’t helped at all.

While planning a show at Ellis Auditorium in Memphis, he was told that the audience would be seperated. White people in front, and black people in a smaller place in the back. He requested if the audience that would come to his concert could be mixed, but eventhough he would be the star of the show, his request got denied. So, he cancelled just two hours before the show.

Read the full story about Sam here.

The vinyl story

Selling music as a black musician wasn’t as easy as opposed to being white. In order to sell the LPs the recordlabels came up with the idea to hide the race of the singers and started using white models, often women for higher sale rates.

The idea

I can’t change the past, but changing little pieces makes me feel better. I wish to create awareness for things that sometimes seem so normal or are just simply ignored. And I felt like with this I could create some kind of justice and awareness.

Preperation

I let the model choose the covers she would feel most comfortable with and chose to do three different albumcovers in order to finish the project. Together with help from the model (Mariama Djitte), assistent (Satu Djitte) and creative editor, helping me with the cover art, the lettertype etc (Manu Cabañero) I could finally realize the project I had in mind.

Cameras used

I chose to use a Yashica Mat 124G for both the Percy Sledge pictures because of the depth of field and the fact that the frame is 1:1 already. For the Otis albumcover I used a Nikon FE2 with Cinestill 800T because of the close up portrait I could not have gotten with the Yashica.

I hope you like “the vinyl project, a project meant against discrimination.” and I hope you will see the love and passion for music and artists put into this project as I have meant to.