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Music

Major Ivy League

LEAGUE YEAR BOOK LAUNCH with HOLY COBRAS, THE SOUPCANS and MANNEQUIN at Parts & Labour (1566 Queen West), Thursday (January 19). $10 or $8 with book purchase. See listing.


Chances are if you’ve ever been to a garage rock show in Toronto, you’ve seen Ivy Lovell front and centre, dancing, drinking with the bands and occasionally snapping a photo.

The 26-year-old photographer is as much a fixture on the local scene as the musicians themselves, not to mention the sound guys, promoters and bartenders, all of whom tend to know her by name.

Lovell’s photography has adorned album covers, Facebook event wrap-ups and even the occasional documentary, but throughout her half-decade on the scene she hasn’t found much of a sustained professional outlet. That should hopefully change this Thursday as Lovell launches her first professionally-bound self-published photo book at Parts & Labour.

A seven-inch record-sized collection entitled League Year Book, the book documents her eventful 2011 in pictures.

Those photos, instilled with a beer-soaked that’s hazy and nostalgic while also present and vital, manage to capture the frantic energy of a loud rock show in the guise of a still frame – not an easy task. That’s likely a result of her method. Lovell began as an anologue, filmic photographer and though she’s switched to digital, she still avoids Photoshop like the plague.

“Even if you shoot digitally, you don’t have to enhance every photo you take,” she says over pints at the Victory Café. “It doesn’t always have to be the most beautiful cropped and composed thing. I don’t even have Photoshop on my computer, and if it was on my computer I literally wouldn’t know how to use it.”

Peppered among Lovell’s shots of bands like Thee Oh Sees, Teenanger and the Black Lips and are portraits of her own personal life: friends, road trips and drug trips. Lovell’s less a music photographer than a life photographer. It just so happens that her life includes a hell of a lot of music.

“The theme is boys, bands and babes,” she says. “I started taking pictures in high school back in Niagara Falls because I was dating a guy in a band. That’s kind of set the pace for my life since then. I don’t just mean dating guys in bands, but having that close interaction with musicians and getting to know the people behind the stage. I don’t give a shit about knowing famous people. I just prefer being close friends with people whose music I respect and admire.”

After years of documenting her shots online, Lovell began printing DIY soft cover “photomags” a year ago. Though they cost her some money to make, Lovell always gives them away for free.

“The point was never to make money,” she says. “I look at it as a service for my friends. It’s like ‘you love this music as much as I do, so you should have this too.’ You listen to the band, I take pictures of the band, and we can all communally share in it.”

The League Year Book costs $40, but comes with a limited-edition print. Lovell will launch it with a gallery exhibit upstairs at Parts & Labour for the entire month of February, while downstairs in the music venue (The Shop) Lovell is creating a permanent display in which she’ll cover every inch of the walls, plus some of the ceilings and floors, with giant prints of her photos.

“It’s going to be up there until it gets destroyed,” she says, excitedly. “I’d love to see it six months or a year from now with parts of it ripped down or just stained with beer. That would be pretty rad.”

As an added bonus, we asked Lovell to tell us about a couple of shots from the League Year Book.

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“This one was taken at an NXNE party. Ty Segall was playing on a rooftop, and I took this picture on top of another rooftop looking down at them. I went down to Detroit about four or five months ago and gave Ty one of my photomags, and on the back was this picture. I guess he really liked it because about a month later Goner Records contacted me and asked if they could use it for the new Ty Segall compilation. It’s great because if you look at all the people around them you can see they’re surrounded by my friends and people from other bands. And that’s on the insert of Ty’s record. He also used a photo I took of a show in Ottawa for the cover.”

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“This one was taken during the summer when six planets were aligning in the night sky. I gathered a couple of my friends and a couple of their friends, took some mushrooms biked out to the Leslie Spit. Usually that bike ride takes about 40 minutes from downtown, but it took us about six hours. I actually got lost halfway through. When I finally caught up with my friends, the sun was coming out, the planets were aligning, and it was just beautiful. There was like no skyline at all, just this vast nothingness. I walked away from the others for what felt like an hour, but was probably like ten seconds, then turned around and took this picture. I took a bunch of other shots that day, but this is the one that turned out the best.”

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