Matthias Willi: The Moment After

I’ve spent an embarrassing fortune on concerts over the years. Festivals, basement gigs, my cousin’s school nativity play—whatever. I’ll pay money to stand in a crowded room for hours, soaked in my own sweat, listening to people I barely know play songs I’ve already heard, usually while someone spills beer on me. It’s a stupid tax on the feeling that something real is happening in front of you.

Matthias Willi found a better angle. This Swiss photographer worked his way backstage at major festivals and captured artists in that narrow window right after they stumbled offstage—drenched, fried, before the mythology could click back into place. That moment after the show, when the person behind the persona is just standing there, trying to remember how to breathe.

He photographed Iggy Pop, Matthew Bellamy, Josh Homme, Peaches, Cee-Lo Green, Farin Urlaub, Kid Rock, Juliette Lewis, Brian Molko, Robert Trujillo—I could keep going. All these artists in that raw, exposed second. And what gets you in those images is that you can’t fake what you’re seeing. The exhaustion. The relief. Sometimes the quiet disappointment. The person walking back there is a completely different person than the one who walked out.

It’s the moment nobody buys a ticket to see, and maybe that’s the whole point.