Laura Lawis is an award-winning photographer born in Scotland and grown up between England and Portugal. She is specialised in portraits and reportages and thanks to these passions she has travelled the word, collaborating with the most important newspapers and record labels.
She accompanied Derwin Schlecker (Gold Panda) during his trip around Japan, documenting it and taking all the photos that are in his last album Good Luck and Do Your Best.
How did the collaboration with Derwin begin?
Derwin’s manager, Gareth, introduced Derwin and I in early 2014. Derwin had a copy of my book, People. Places. Things. which was a collection of photographs I’d taken throughout the world on my travels. He had some plans for a project which would eventually become his third album. He explained a little about his ideas and asked if I wanted to go with him to Japan to photograph some travels, and people, and places, and things.
Good Luck and Do Your Best is the title of two works: the third album of Gold Panda and the book of the photos you took during the trip in Japan with him. Do you think that your way of looking at reality as a photographer influenced the work of Derwin? Or viceversa?
I think we probably both influenced each other in certain ways. For me, seeing the world through someone else’s eyes, and documenting their experience of a place is always an inspiring way to explore new places. Derwin started writing the album after our first trip to Japan in early 2014, and he would send me tracks and sketches of music as he wrote them. It was a real privilege to be privy to the music-making process. Often as a photographer you are brought in *after* the music is made – for press shots or album artwork or single covers. The music is decided, recorded and completed. But for GLADYB things evolved over a period of time. We went to Japan a second time, took even more photographs. Back in the UK we went to galleries, looked through photography books, watched inspiring films, drank lots of tea and ate lots of cake together! My job was to realise a sense of place via photography, and it was almost certainly aided and guided by a creative dialogue between us.
I’m so curious about the trip in Japan: could you tell us how it was? Did you organised it or was it something like an adventure? Were you searching for people, places or atmosphere or were you simply traveling and document what you saw?
Derwin had lived and travelled a lot in Japan, and he planned a few places for us to visit. We had some bullet train tickets, and a few ideas about the types of places we might like to photograph, but the rest was spontaneous wanderlust and adventuring. We followed our noses. Wandered for hours, walking across miles and miles of a huge bridge, getting lost in suburbia, travelling on trains and subways. We seemed to be drawn to the normal, suburban places. They felt quiet and peaceful and I think we both found we enjoyed the beauty of similar things.
Who has chosen the photo for the album? How was this process?
The cover image is a photograph I took in Kyoto during our travels. I took it on my Canon AE1 on 35mm film. I really fell in love with Japan and was wowed by the country – its people, their hard-working demeanour and the ever-present concept of doing one’s best. The cover shot is of a security guard bending over to pick out a piece of rubbish from a well-kept row of plants. For me, the image encapsulates the notion of hard work, diligence and commitment I found present in so many of the people we met there. Derwin named the album after a Hiroshima taxi driver’s parting gesture to us was ‘good luck and do your best’, and people doing their best and trying hard is a real underlying theme in a lot of the photography we produced.
When Derwin and I sat down to try and decide the cover image, we played around a lot with framings and with a few images. It was Derwin’s idea to frame the cover photograph in that way – the landscape photograph at the top of the square, with white space underneath. I loved it as soon as we tried it. Derwin has a really great eye for detail and design, and I think he sees things in a very unique and beautiful way. I wouldn’t have ever thought to frame a photograph like that but it’s a strong and effective result, he really has a great eye.
Did you do other collaborations with Derwin?
Not yet! Although we do spend a lot of time drinking tea and eating cake together 🙂
What’s the best album cover ever?
That’s a very difficult question. Spinal Tap, Smell The Glove final version springs to mind! That film is incredible and Nigel saying ‘none more black’ is always somewhere in the back of my mind.
I think I first knew I wanted to be a photographer when I saw jazz album covers like Miles Davis, Kind Of Blue and John Coltrane, Blue Train. There is such an honesty and intimacy in the imagery, it makes me want to travel back in time and take up smoking cigarettes again and get lost late at night in a jazz bar somewhere.
As a child I remember finding my mum’s Pink Floyd, Relics and The Beatles Sgt. Pepper LPs. I really enjoyed the psychedelic and quite tongue in cheek designs. In the 90s I worked in record shops and spent all my wages on things like the special edition box set of Spiritualized Ladies and Gentlemen We Are Floating In Space (where each track is a separate CD pill in pharmaceutical packaging) and the Godspeed You! Black Emperor F♯ A♯ ∞ vinyl.
The Godspeed cover and design was something Derwin and I both loved and looked at when discussing different ideas for GLADYB. It was nice to revisit it and dig out the inserts – I’d always loved the crushed penny and hand drawn pictures. They were like little gifts and windows into the world of the band.
