ALL Magazine November 2016 | Page 56

Music Through Her Eyes: An Interview with Concert  Photographer  Jordan     Concert photography is an art. It is an art that captures moments of sound and movement and forever immortalizes them in print. It is the voyeuristic capitalization of a moment that celebrates the passion of a song, the soul of an artist as they serenade a crowd. It helps us to remember sensations of the experience if we were there, and fills of with longing if we were not. No one captures these moments as beautifully as Jordan Hefler. Her photographs bring song to life. Jordan, who graduated from Louisiana State University with a Bachelor in Fine Arts, has been a featured artist on Instagram, and her work caught the attention of the organizers for Van’s Warped Tour, of which she will be a part in 2017. I caught up with Jordan, who took time out of her busy schedule to sit down and chat with us and share some of her favorite concert stories and photographs. How do you end up in photography? My dad has always been interested in photography. He took a few classes in college and has always had cameras and lenses around the house for as long as I can remember. For a while when I was younger, he had a side business where he did motor sport photography at races and printed the photos on-site in a camper. People would come by our camper at the race track to see if he got a good photo of them on their motorcycle, in their car, or whatever, and if he did they would buy a print. We would print and frame them right then and there. It was all very fast paced and he would try to get a photo of every single person just in case they wanted to buy a print. I somewhat helped run the business when I was little and from there it got me kind of interested in taking photos as well. I've always been extremely drawn (no pun intended) to art and was a pretty creative child in general. Photography was something I just remember playing around with all the time. I remember first starting to teach myself Photoshop in 4th grade and also having mini-photo shoots in my room with my dad's film camera and my stuffed animals as early as 2nd grade. I also had a video camera where I made short stop motion films with my Barbie dolls. I would bring disposable cameras on field trips and just take pictures of everything. I was just always doing something. After doing some fun shoots with friends in high school, I realized that I wanted to pursue photography in college and I haven't stopped since.