Jeff Howlett Captures the Moments Between the Beats

Her knees and arms bent, midriff showing over black jeans with a studded belt, a black tank top matching the wisps of hair that fly toward her face running counter to the eye makeup that shoots toward the back of head, one fist clenched tightly by her side with the other wrapped around a microphone, Clarissa Badini is caught in a primal scream.

The vocalist for the all-woman death-metal band Castrator is onstage at The Kraken in Chapel Hill, performing in the 2023 Carolina Chainsaw Massacre festival. The fact that Badini holds her mic by her side indicates that she is not belting out on of her death-rattling vocals but instead caught in a moment between the lines in which she’s acting on pure adrenaline and emotion.

These are the points in time that Jeff Howlett looks to capture in his concert photography.

“Sometimes it’s the moments in between the beat, if you will,” Howlett explains. “In music, it’s like that moment in between a beat when she’s whipping around … In that photo, she’s not singing per se, she has the mic down by her side, but the action of the mic, it’s in between the beat of what’s going on and the movements of what’s going on. It’s just capturing those moments in between that I think are really special.”

We’ve pulled two chairs from a hallway at the York County Center for the Arts in Rock Hill, South Carolina, and are sitting in the middle of Dalton Gallery fronting East Main Street, surrounded by dozens of Howlett’s black-and-white live-music photographs and portraiture.

His exhibit, Dreams of Silver Shadows, opened on Jan. 6 and will remain on display through Feb. 8, including during the upcoming Black and White Gala, York County Arts Council’s annual fundraising event scheduled for Feb. 1.

It’s a point of pride for Howlett, who’s called Rock Hill home for the last 12 years and has enjoyed watching the Center support the active but lesser-known arts scene in town. It’s also a fitting theme, as Howlett shoots almost exclusively in black-and-white (his popular tintype photographs can be described more as sepia-toned but mostly fit the bill).

As noted in the exhibit name, it’s the shadows of the old-style imagery brought into contemporary times that speak to him.

“You really catch really interesting moments in those shadows, textures and stuff, and I just love how that comes across … in black and white,” he explains. “I don’t really see it as much in color photography.”

The exhibit shares photos of musicians from a range of genres at different ages and different levels of fame, from George Clinton during his stop at The Fillmore Charlotte on his farewell tour to Charlotte rapper MAVI in the midst of a Hopscotch Festival performance with a promising career ahead of him.

From the time he was 12 years old, Howlett has had a passion for telling stories through one medium or another. Beginning with music and moving through filmmaking and photography, his journey has taken him through different dimensions of time and space, always in search of an outlet.

If one thing is clear, his story is anything but black and white.

Storytelling in multiple mediums

Since the time Howlett’s parents took him to a John Denver show at the age of 6, he’s known he wanted to be around music.

“They took me to that concert and that was definitely a game changer,” he recalls. “I was like, ‘I want to do what that guy’s doing.’”

Growing up in Waynesboro, Virginia, Howlett joined his first band at age 12. He continued to play music, usually as vocalist and/or bassist, through his time at Burlington College, which is how he landed in Vermont and helped launch the band that would become his most successful music project, Five Seconds Expired.

The alt-metal band signed to Profile Records in New York City, joining labelmates like hardcore punk acts Cro-Mags and Murphy’s Law and legendary hip-hop pioneers Run DMC. They saw success on college radio stations, touring for a few years and releasing their solo full-length album Null in 1996.

Howlett went on to play in Non Compos, which signed to a few different labels but flamed out after a year and a half when some of the members went on to play in different bands and Howlett started a family in Vermont.

“I became a father and music drifted off a little bit,” he recalls. “That’s when photography really kicked in.”

Howlett had experimented through the lens of a Yashica point-and-shoot camera that his father gave him at age 17. He carried it around for years before, as tends to happen to one’s possessions in their twenties, “it disappeared into the ether,” as Howlett tells it.

The birth of his first child in 2002 got him back into the artform, learning new tricks as he shot portraits of his kids, the second of whom was born in 2005. Meanwhile, he returned to Burlington College, where he had previously earned a degree in psychology. After years of social work that he enjoyed, his return trip to the school setting inspired an epiphany.

“I was like, ‘This really sucks. I really don’t like psychology,’” he says.

He did, however, considerably enjoy his film production class. He took up that medium and began shooting music videos, eventually doing commercial work and making a job out of it.

In 2012, he released his first full-length documentary, A Band Called Death, which tells the story of three Black men from Detroit who launched a band (called Death) that some credit as the first punk-rock band ever.
Howlett moved to Charlotte shortly before the documentary was released and has lived in the area since.

In mid-2023, just as Howlett had put in his two-week notice at his IT job to pursue filmmaking and photography full-time, a motorcycle wreck on I-77 nearly took his life.

He broke nine bones but says he left the hospital just two days later determined to make his dream a reality. Many of his photos are from the time period around that incident, which seemingly marked a turning point in his life.

Four days after the wreck, he was at Rabbit Rabbit in Asheville shooting Queens of the Stone Age. He insists he only took Advil to help him through his recovery.

“I think that when you go through something like that, it’s pain, and pain is just pain,” he says. “I’ve dealt with painful things in life, and it’s just, you bear with it. You just go through it.”

Jeff Howlett discovers a passion for tintype

Since his early days experimenting with the medium, Howlett has always been inspired by old-style photography.
One of his greatest inspirations is Arthur Fellig, known by his pseudonym Weegee, a photographer and photojournalist known for his stark black-and-white street photography highlighting life in early-to-mid-20th-century New York City.

Another is Vivian Maier, a street photographer who shot tens of thousands of photos of the people and architecture of Chicago, New York City, and Los Angeles during the same time period and later but whose work wasn’t discovered and recognized until after her death in 2009.

Howlett was drawn to the grimy feel of early-20th-century crime photography and enjoyed the process of rifling through old photos with the family of Death’s members while putting his documentary together.

Much of his concert photography shows these inspirations, but it wasn’t until around 2014 that Howlett discovered the work of Ellen Susan, who uses wet-plate collodion photography to create captivating and sometimes haunting portraits of US Army soldiers, many of whom have returned from deployment.

Howlett had seen Matthew Brady’s famed Civil War-era wet-plate portraiture of Abraham Lincoln and other leaders of the time, but seeing the process implemented in the present day was new to him.

“Seeing it in contemporary times and somebody was actually doing it, I was like, ‘Oh, man, I got to contact her,’” he recalls.

He reached out to Susan to ask if she held workshops and she invited him to her home for a day of learning.

“She taught me soup-to-nuts how to do it — how to mix the chemistry, how to photograph outside, inside, natural light, artificial light,” he says. “It was a one-day download, and it was so much information. I just fell in love with it and the whole process.”

He spent about a year in his backyard offering free portraits to any friends who would come and sit for him, perfecting the craft through trial and error until he felt comfortable enough to book his first gig at the Asheville Tattoo Convention.

It’s a wonder to watch Howlett work at one of the many pop-ups and art fairs he shows up to around Charlotte and beyond. He spends some time sitting the subject(s) then scrambles back under a cloak known as a darkcloth to shoot on his large-format tintype camera.

A large flash of light and some chemical mixing creates a captivating image that catches a remarkable amount of detail.

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There was a time in the beginning when Howlett was so anxious about simply capturing any worthwhile image that he didn’t bother much with direction, but now he can help his subjects create the best image possible. The challenge is getting folks who are so familiarized with quick iPhone shots to sit still and look relaxed long enough to let the process work.

“Just having the person relax, being comfortable, because it is pretty intense … It’s a lot of light, generally speaking, when I’m doing them indoors, and it’s a big flash,” he explains. “I like to prepare people for what’s going to happen. So when people come and they usually sit down and get comfortable, I’m like, ‘Stay right there. Don’t move. The way you just sat down is the best way we’re going to execute this photograph,’ because that seems to me to be always the best approach so far. I’m still learning, though.”

Howlett has turned his creative passions into a full-time job since the accident, continuing to shoot music videos and do commercial filmmaking while splitting his photography work between tintype gigs and live music shoots. He’ll often book a tintype job somewhere out of town to work during the day then find out what interesting bands are playing in the area so he can shoot the show by night.

His recent purchase of a sprinter van means he’s in it for the long haul, enabling him to travel farther out for shows and other jobs. He’s intrigued to see what 2025 might have in store.

“I’m just excited to be creative,” he says. “2025 is going to be a really creative year. It’s a lot of fucked up shit in the world that is going on and I think, out of all that, a lot of creative folks and resources will come together as one and really create some magic.”

He just has to look for the moments between the beats.