Rock Photography, Raw Moments & the Shot Adela Loconte Almost Didn't Take

Adela Loconte Left the M83 Show Disappointed. The Band Used Her Photos on ABC News.

Adela Loconte doesn't chase the perfect shot. She chases the honest one. The New York-based editorial photographer and senior producer — born in Caracas with Italian roots, schooled in London, seasoned in Barcelona, now rooted in Williamsburg — has spent her career in the most unpredictable rooms in music: festival pits, packed venues, nightlife floors where the light is wrong and the crowd is moving and something true is happening anyway. She keeps her images as raw as possible. The rawness, it turns out, is exactly what people remember.

The M83 story is the one that tells you everything about how Adela Loconte works.

Webster Hall, packed beyond comfortable. The crowd unfriendly toward the press pit. Nine photographers total — she was the only woman shooting. Everyone trying to help each other out, jumping on speakers, angling for anything usable in conditions that weren't cooperating. She left disappointed, certain she hadn't gotten the right shots.

Two weeks later, M83's publicist wrote to thank the press contingent for their coverage. He mentioned that Loconte's photos were his favourites. Two weeks after that, he wrote again: the band and crew had reviewed everything from the entire tour and agreed her shots were the best. They asked to use them in an ABC News documentary.

"I left disappointed that I hadn't captured the right shots."

The gap between what the photographer thought she had made and what the world received is not an accident of that particular night. It is a way of working. Loconte keeps her images raw — not unpolished for its own sake, but unmanipulated, close to the moment as it actually happened, resistant to the kind of retrospective perfection that removes the evidence of difficulty. What she got from that Webster Hall floor, in impossible conditions, was something the band recognised as true. Truth and disappointment are not mutually exclusive. Sometimes the rawness is only visible from the outside.

She arrived at this practice through an unusual set of cities and roles. Caracas gave her the music obsession that runs through everything — a passion visible in her visual work before any formal training. The University of the Arts London formalised the eye. Barcelona sharpened the production instinct: four years including work as a planner for the CMYK International Independent Magazine Culture Festival and at Sónar. Then New York, then Williamsburg, then the full portfolio of music photography, portraiture, journalism, and nightlife that she has been building since.

Alongside the photography, Loconte has worked as a Senior Producer at PBS Channel Thirteen and V-Media, as Programming Information Manager, and co-directed Sheik 'n' Beik events for nearly three years. The Metal Magazine Fashion Week party in 2010. The years at Sónar. A career, in other words, that runs in multiple directions simultaneously — always back to the image, but informed by the production knowledge of someone who understands how the room is built before the photograph is made.

Ask her about inspiration and the answer is two words: music and day-to-day experiences. It sounds like shorthand until you understand it as precision. Every night in a new venue, every crowd with its own energy, every artist in a different relationship to the stage and the moment — these are not backdrops for her photography. They are the subject. The day-to-day is not filler between the significant events. It is where the significant events actually live.

"Every night is a different story and experience."

Brooklyn, she says, gives her the music scene, her closest people, and the walking distance to the places she loves. That last detail — the walking distance — is the one worth sitting with. A photographer who values proximity, who keeps images raw, who left a show disappointed and came back with the best shots on the tour. The closeness is the method.

Adela Loconte is an editorial photographer and senior producer based in Williamsburg, New York. Her work spans music, portraiture, journalism, and nightlife. Discover more artists chosen for how they inspire, not just their visibility, at Antakly Projects.