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Going Out Guide. Frozen in silence: A look inside D.C.'s still shuttered music venues
Going Out Guide
Frozen in silence: A look inside D.C.’s still shuttered music venues
By Ben Eisendrath
MAY 4, 2021
In February, I went somewhere I hadn’t been in almost a year. Madam’s Organ is just a couple blocks from my house, and it’s one of my go-tos when I need to see familiar faces behind a bar or interesting strangers lining one. The walls are dense with taxidermy, burlesque paintings and the right kind of dust. Instruments and bicycles hang from the ceiling. Above the “suggestion box” stands a three-foot-tall plaster middle finger.
On a typical Wednesday before the pandemic you could find a country band onstage, foreign diplomats and White House staffers yelling requests, and owner Bill Duggan, wine glass in hand, holding court in the corner.
On this winter night, however, the Adams Morgan blues bar — my blues bar — was closed. But it looked different than just closed — the room looked like it had been interrupted, like everyone had been raptured mid-drink. Bottles sat on the bar, instruments lay on the stage and stools were arrayed for a better view — of nothing.
{snip}
Note: All photographs for this project were shot in available light, in clubs as I found them, using a single Leica Monochrom black-and-white-only camera. The spaces were not cleaned or manipulated, and I asked that most house lights be left off, as they have been for the duration of the pandemic. You can see more of my work on Instagram @insomnigraphic.
Frozen in silence: A look inside D.C.’s still shuttered music venues
By Ben Eisendrath
MAY 4, 2021
In February, I went somewhere I hadn’t been in almost a year. Madam’s Organ is just a couple blocks from my house, and it’s one of my go-tos when I need to see familiar faces behind a bar or interesting strangers lining one. The walls are dense with taxidermy, burlesque paintings and the right kind of dust. Instruments and bicycles hang from the ceiling. Above the “suggestion box” stands a three-foot-tall plaster middle finger.
On a typical Wednesday before the pandemic you could find a country band onstage, foreign diplomats and White House staffers yelling requests, and owner Bill Duggan, wine glass in hand, holding court in the corner.
On this winter night, however, the Adams Morgan blues bar — my blues bar — was closed. But it looked different than just closed — the room looked like it had been interrupted, like everyone had been raptured mid-drink. Bottles sat on the bar, instruments lay on the stage and stools were arrayed for a better view — of nothing.
{snip}
Note: All photographs for this project were shot in available light, in clubs as I found them, using a single Leica Monochrom black-and-white-only camera. The spaces were not cleaned or manipulated, and I asked that most house lights be left off, as they have been for the duration of the pandemic. You can see more of my work on Instagram @insomnigraphic.