Christmas trees and sherpa coats.
Label Parties is the only shoot in that January 2025 run made in a crowd - eleven frames inside Analog, the intimate live-music venue on the second floor of the Hutton Hotel near Music Row, at a big industry meeting made in the stretch between Christmas and New Year's with the tree still lit in the corner. It opens on Alpha The Wolf alone - seated in profile in a black crew-neck tee and pearl chain, arms crossed, watching the room. Then the coat goes on and the shoot turns social, though "social" undersells the mood: by every account of the night, the wolf was not amused.
The bulk of it is candid two-shots: Alpha in an oversized grey sherpa coat and small round shades, face-to-face with a guest in a pink hoodie and yellow cap, a third man in a grey hoodie drifting through the background. Shot from low angles, over shoulders, through the blur of other people - the Christmas tree lights breaking up the frame in bursts of colour behind him.
Nobody is posing. It reads like documentation of an actual party that happened to have a camera in it - the same register as the La Vergne studio session, where the shoot is just a work night with a photographer in the room.
The title is doing at least two things at once. "Label parties" is what record labels throw at year's end - this one at Analog, a room built for exactly this kind of industry mixing, from album release parties to corporate receptions - and it is also the clothing-label read: the sherpa coat, the shades, the chain, all worn out to one. No banner in frame, just the venue's own murals and string lights, and a guest of honor who would rather have been somewhere else.
What "Label Parties" means
Every other shoot in the January 2025 run puts one figure alone in a cold, empty place - a lake, a weir, a shut garden. Label Parties is the exception: warm, indoors, full of people, and the one where the isolation is a choice rather than the setting. Shades on, arms crossed early, watching before he talks - not detachment for its own sake here, just a room he had to be in more than one he wanted to be in. The industry throws the party; the artist shows up for it and counts the minutes.
SEE ALL 11 PHOTOS FROM THE SHOOT HERE
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