Carol Lipnik

Coney Island native Carol Lipnik approached me while working on her 2014 CD, Almost Back to Normal, to ask if I could take a pinhole portrait of her for the cover. She wanted a moody and etherial portrait to accompany her haunting and humorous songs and thought a pinhole photo would work perfectly. We discussed her ideas and quickly agreed to work together.

I took 120 portraits of Carol over the course of two lengthy sessions in my Dumbo, Brooklyn studio. We worked quickly and loosely with the props and costumes stylist Machine Dazzle brought, casting a wide net as we explored the humorous, weird, and beautiful ways they contributed to the characters and moods in Carol’s songs. Hands figured in many of the portraits, partly because they are so expressive but also because of ways in which they played off of words and images in the music.

To my delight I also ended up designing Carol’s CD. We explored a handful of the portraits and eventually settled on five for a design that draws on some of the classic album covers of the 1960s and 1970s New York City music scene.

“What separates Ms. Lipnik from every other conjurer of the otherworldly is her phenomenal voice. With a four-octave range, impeccable pitch and several distinct personalities within that voice, Ms. Lipnik evoked singers as disparate as Diamanda Galás, Maude Maggart, Yma Sumac and the yodeling Joni Mitchell. Her instrument is, in a word, phenomenal.” —Stephen Holden, The New York Times