“I suffered panic attacks at concerts”: the full-speed years of Ruth Baza, the photographer of the great rockers of the nineties

Even before having spoken with Ruth Baza (Madrid, 1972), I already had an idea of ​​her voice. The writing that kept me awake also kept me awake. “Sorry for the time…” he wrote to me at 4:21 in the morning. “The night has its own rhythm.” On another occasion, at 3:28 a.m., he transmitted to me the image of a trance: “I sleep little. I write torrents at night. In silence. By the light of a candle.”

Baza considers herself a writer first and foremost, but that period of photographic boom that began at the age of 17—when it occurred to her to call Frames and showing up at the editor’s office, taking his writings—doesn’t feel far away. Three decades have passed since that heyday ended. Baza, who has lived with anorexia and chronic depression throughout his life, as well as agoraphobia since 2012, receives the call, although he does not say where it comes from. At one point in our conversation, I shared with her that I remembered the phrase that Basquiat’s mother said to the young artist when she saw his paintings: “You’re moving very fast.”

Baza explains it better: “I started receiving offers to interview great actors: Liza Minnelli, Dennis Quaid, Bruce Willis, Schwarzenegger… It felt natural for me to approach them. I wasn’t trying to cross that line that separates the person in front of you from their privacy, I was simply having a conversation. I grew up in an adult world, so it was much easier for me to talk to them than with people of my own generation. I remember that my first published interview appeared when I was about to turn 19. From then on, Everything happened very quickly and happened in a fun way. What I wanted was to find out what was behind the mask: talk to the person, not the star.

“I avoided being direct when I had to ask something; I just wanted to talk as I would with a friend. Of course, always respectful, well-informed and keeping a certain distance, but the distance was easily broken because they saw me for who I was. Not naive, but young and inexperienced, someone who no one had taught how to do this: I just did it.

“During the last few years I have been listening to those recordings because I am preparing a compilation of my best interviews. It is exciting to hear those voices again and remember that the trust was there. They stripped themselves emotionally with enormous ease. Most people think that rock stars, actors or great writers are untouchable, but they are as human as you and me. There were people who impressed me, but they impressed me with their humanity.

“In the nineties, it was very difficult to become a respected photographer as a woman. There were hardly any women dedicated to rock photography. When I was on stage or in the pit photographing Björk, the Sex Pistols or Counting Crows, the first thing was to survive the other photographers. It was terrifying, even dangerous. I remember having more than one panic attack inside the pit, because those photographers were real animals. Trapped there, with the audience pushing the huge metal fences from the stage, I could hear everything, but I could barely breathe. I thought that the fences were going to fall and that I was going to die, but I kept telling myself: ‘I have to take the photos. I don’t know how I’m going to make it, but I have to take them.’

“A lot of people saw me as a writer and not as a photographer. When they saw what I did – close-ups, black and white, grain everywhere, no flash, no technique – they said, ‘What is this?’. No one wanted to publish my photographs, but I liked what I did. I had been taking photos since I was a child. My first camera was a gift from my grandmother when I was six years old, and I loved photographing television. I would sit and watch Cary Grant or Humphrey Bogart and take pictures of the screen. with my Kodak Instamatic. When I started writing, photography was an accessory and it took me a long time to start publishing my images. But around the age of twenty things began to flow and I began to gain respect in the profession.

“Most of my photographs are what I called ‘controlled accidents’. There are no poses, there is no glamour, there is no makeup: just the person and me. I never tried to take the perfect photograph, but rather to find the perfect person or the most imperfect one. That is the most important thing: to look at a photograph and discover the person you did not expect to see. With Tori Amos, for example, there was no need to control anything. We became very good friends during the three days we spent together in Ireland. All those images are quite strange, because Tori used to control all the photographs that were taken of her at that time, but with me she allowed me to see her as she was.

“I also wrote about friends of mine. In those cases you have more time and you know how to approach sensitive issues. Iggy Pop and I spent a lot of time together, and I interviewed him several times. I would go to his house, turn on the recorder and we would talk about everything, because he was always willing to talk. He is one of the most profound people I have ever met. He was not yet the godfather of punk that everyone knows.

“The first time we met Iggy was going through a deep crisis and he told me: ‘This is shit. Nobody cares about my music. Nobody buys my records’. He had started making some movies, but he wasn’t satisfied with his performances. He was very insecure because he wasn’t that kind of person; he wasn’t a divo. He told me: ‘I don’t know what to do with my life’. That crisis lasted a few years. Then he published American Caesar and I named it man of the year. Suddenly they wanted to use their songs in advertisements and series. We were very amused, and he said: ‘Leave it, this will pay the bills.’ For him it was essential to always keep moving.

“I think that throughout my life I have been going too fast. That makes one get tired early and often. In 1998 I began to distance myself from the press to concentrate on my first book, The intermittent life (Grijalbo). I felt like I had already touched heaven and needed to take a different path. During those hectic years I never had time to enjoy my private life. She was devoted to traveling constantly and lived in a permanent state of jet lag. He wrote as if in a trance, but it was no longer as natural a process as it is today. I always felt free, although I was aware that I was living fast. I even thought that I could die during the process, because I have always lived on the edge of the precipice. But I was never afraid. I had experienced so many things from such a young age that I was not worried about the possibility of dying. Going fast happens when you have no ambition, but an immense hunger to live.”