Chatting with Neil Krug

Neil Krug is a self-taught 28-year-old director/photographer new to the Los Angeles art scene. Earlier this year he released an opus of pure viewing pleasure called the Pulp Art Book, which features photographs capturing an array of powerful and painfully sexy personas portrayed by his wife and muse, Joni Harbeck, in a raw 70s aesthetic. The book, the first of three volumes, has garnered a flood of attention in the art world. With a new bride, child, and a flurry of films and books on the go, Krug is a young untapped talent living out any burgeoning photographers wet dream. Looking at his work, I figured this dude would be into some cool shit.

So you’re originally from Kansas. What was it like growing up there?

Neil Krug: I lived in Kansas for the first 27 years of my life. The preconceived notion of Kansas is that it's full of a rednecks and wheat fields, and to some degree that's true but I was fortunate enough to be raised in Lawrence which is a college town with it's own unique artistic subculture. As much as I love the place it was time for a change of scenery. There’s just so much to do in LA, and my agencies are here: Nest Artists and Honey Badger. Joni and I just moved out this summer.

That would be supermodel Joni Harbeck, your wife and the gorgeous and ubiquitous subject of the Pulp Art Book?

Yes, we were married in 2010. We met through a mutual friend in Lawrence.  Joni is originally from the Kansas City area.

Would you say you two fell in love over the course of the creation of Pulp?

Definitely. I had always wanted to do a project like Pulp, and when I met Joni we began to influence each other’s work. We started spending all our time together and travelling together. I can’t really remember when it happened, it just naturally happened.

You’ve shot music videos for Ratatat, Devendra Banhart, and Ladytron among others. What kind of music do you listen to?

I like those bands, I also love old psychedelic records, and Jazz; Miles Davis; Bitches Brew, In A Silent Way – all of his late 60s, early 70s compositions are mind blowing. I like old folk music, and also electronic music. When I was 17 I listened to Aphex Twin, lots of stuff from the Warped Label, Boards of Canada, and Radiohead.

What inspires the grainy, color-casted, 70s aesthetic of your photos?

I love spaghetti westerns. A lot of those films were very low-budget productions shot in southeastern Spain, because it looked like the Southwestern United States. I love 60s counter culture films in general. One of my favorite films is Juliet of the Spirits by Federico Fellini. That was the first color film that he did. He dropped LSD in 1965 and decided to make a color movie, and it’s the most incredible movie, and it stars his wife. It’s just such a personal, surrealistic story.

Can you tell me about some of the special effects in your videos?

I’ve always been interested in animation and computer graphics. If you take a very cursory look at my work you come away thinking I’m a low-tech Polaroid photographer but before any of that ever came about I was really into Japanese animation, like the film Akira. I learned how to render 3D animation when I was 22. When I did the cover of Gravity the Seducer I knew I wanted it to be like a computer graphic matte painting, not just a Polaroid or regular photograph. It needed to be this allegorical sci-fi looking landscape.

How much of the Pulp book was shot in Death Valley?

Just one photo actually – at the Trona Pinnacles which is just outside of Death Valley. The funny thing about that shot was that I didn’t even know what it was and then later when I was researching I saw it’s actually a really expensive location to rent that they use for big budget movies like Planet of the Apes. I had no idea it was a famous spot. It looked like an underwater fish tank from afar with all these weird sculptural rock formations. I think Pulp 2 will have a few more images from Death Valley.

How far along is Pulp 2?

It’s finished in terms of the shooting. We’re going to do three volumes. The first one came out earlier this year, the second one will come out in the first quarter of next year.

And you shot Pulp mostly on expired Polaroid film. Did you choose the name Pulp because old pulp fiction magazines were always printed on cheap wood pulp paper?

The whole thing was to make it look like old illustrated book covers, and expired Polaroid film lent itself to an illustrated look more so than any other film I could think of at the time, and I was already using it anyways. Not all of Pulp was shot on Polaroid, though, there’s tons of different film formats in there.

So how did you get the shots with multiple Joni’s hanging out?

N: It’s either multiple exposures done in-camera or sometimes it’s composited shots. It changes all the time, depends on the mood I’m in. Some stuff I shot for the band The Horrors used a lot of in-camera double exposures that we did in a graveyard in London, it was wild.

I love shooting in graveyards.

You would never know that it was, that was just the only place that we could get some peace.

For Pulp you wanted some of the images to look like vinyl LP covers – what are some of your favorite album covers?

Bitches Brew, Miles Davis – that’s such an amazing cover. Dan McPharlin, he’s an artist from Australia. He’s been doing some really good album covers. He has this sort of Roger Dean sci-fi approach which is a desirable aesthetic within the graphic design community. Also my friend Leif Podhajsky, another Australian, he does great covers for Tame Impala. I love tripped out covers.

Where did you get the guns for Pulp? Are they real?

The guns and weapons we use are always real.  The last thing we want is someone who really owns one to say: "That's not the real thing, it's a fucking fake".  We met a gun collector a few years ago that used to supply weapons for action movies and has everything you can possibly imagine.  He claimed to have supplied all the guns in the Rambo films.  Either way he owns everything from Civil War weapons to inner-city street guns from the 1970s and beyond.