An Introduction

an excerpt from the introduction of the book...

This book is a collection of pictures of my guitars. Each guitar has a face-on "portrait shot", one or more detail shots of some feature I wanted to particularly emphasize and a short narrative about the guitar and some of my personal history with that instrument. These narrative descriptions are meant to be purely personal and somewhat anecdotal. It's not my intention to present a technical discussion of each piece. Collectors and guitar lovers will have a strong understanding of what they're looking at already, and the technical characteristics of the individual instruments can usually be reviewed in other publications devoted to the material and design details of the manufacturers. This is a book for people who enjoy looking at beautiful works of the luthier's craft, and learning a little bit about the guitars and how and why I came to have them.

This project really morphed far beyond my original intent. It started, I think, as just a photographic record for insurance purposes. It ended up as you see here. Kevin Haislip took the photographs, and that's where the project started to grow. He brought a really fresh perspective to the art of photographing musical instruments. You might notice that the photography here is not "hot" in the sense that we consciously tried to avoid the clichéd technique of using glare to emphasize flashiness or curvature. I had clusters of ideas that I wanted to get on film somehow, but oftentimes I couldn't really verbalize them well. Kevin's technical excellence and the fact that he was unencumbered by any sort of habits photographing guitars enabled him to come up with some amazing views. We made up the angles as we went along. I honestly feel these pictures are probably the best photography of guitars I've ever seen.

His oblique shot of the Clapton Strat is a good example. I, and guitar lovers everywhere have collectively seen millions of Strat photos. But I've never seen anything like this one. I've heard that when Eric Clapton first saw Jimi Hendrix playing a Strat in London, he asked in amazement, "what spaceship is that?" I could never really figure that out, beyond the fact that it was the '60s. But the shot of the Strat that is the front piece of this book does look like a spaceship, cruising slowly through the void.

When Kevin's friend, a graphic designer, and printing specialist came into the picture (so to speak), that's where what you're holding in your hands really began to take shape. He has a vision far beyond what I had conceived of when I needed some photographs for insurance purposes.

Well, I hope you love looking at these pictures and reading the narratives as much as I did writing them and working with Kevin Haislip. Well, actually, I hope you love them one heck of a lot more, because this project has consumed too many late nights and taken up way too much time, but in the end, it is really worth it. There are some fine examples of the best that 20th and 21st Century American hearts and ingenuity and persistence can bring forth presented on the pages that follow, and I'm happy to be able to share these beautiful instruments with you.

Enjoy!

Portland, Oregon Spring 2003

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