REM’s Michael Stipe on his new artbook, ‘insanely heroic’ Colin Kaepernick and making music again
- Stipe’s new untitled artbook features people from Tilda Swinton to Breonna Taylor and is ‘a portrait of what type of attributes I admire in the people around me’
- The pandemic has given him time to start dabbling in music again and he admits to missing performing live in one of the world’s biggest bands
REM might have collectively retired as a band in 2011, but frontman Michael Stipe certainly didn’t resign himself to an alt-rock old home.
He’s still relevant, but now more as a visual artist. Before becoming one of the great pop icons of the ’80s, Stipe studied painting and photography at the University of Georgia. These days, he’s focused less on writing oblique and poetic songs, and more on creating personal yet enigmatic photography books (published through Italian artbook specialist Damiani).
“My first photo book was in 1998 with [American singer-songwriter] Patti Smith when she came back to performing,” Stipe says from his home in Athens, Georgia. “Then, I vowed to myself I would put out a book a year for the rest of my life. It took me 20 years to actually manifest that.”
The first of his recent hardcovers, Volume One, in 2018, was an intimate but disparate selection of 35 images curated from “tens of thousands, if not hundreds of thousands” of photos Stipe snapped over his life. The second tome, Our Interference Times: A Visual Record, was a collaboration with Generation-X author Douglas Coupland in 2019 that is even more cryptic in its textured analogue collaged images, rightly described in the promotional blurb as a “tug of war between pixels and halftone”.
Now, Stipe’s much-delayed most recent effort is out. The untitled work was supposed to be a collection of portraits featuring people he admires and venerates, but the pandemic scuttled all plans to take pictures in person.