THE MINDS OF 99. Fans and regular readers will know they made history in June 2024, playing 3 concerts 3 nights in a row to more than 140000 fans, at the Danish national stadium ‘Parken’. Never been done before, not even by the big international acts. And will probably never be done again. These were truly once-in-a-lifetime days. How do you document this historical event? Team work! I previously posted my own essay from Parken, but this is the definitive combined essay featuring a carefully curated selection of our combined work from my awesome team: Anna Borgkvist Web+IG, Kasper Krupsdahl Web+IG, Malthe Ivarsson Web+IG, Morten Rygaard FB+IG.
This is where I again try and find the words for how absolutely amazing this entire project was, once-in-a-lifetime. And I will yet fail to find these words, it is the biggest and best project I have ever done and will ever do as a music photographer. I am glad I have all the memories and pictures because honestly somedays it feels like a dream! But that is also what the shows were, you forgot you were in a football stadium, it felt like being inside this alternate reality, an immersive MINDS dreamworld! It really was magical and I am so grateful to have experienced this. I do have the words to thank my team for being absolutely awesome and a joy to work with, and for putting up with my emails and spreadsheets! I prepared for these shows for many months and one of the things was putting my team together and organising shooting scripts for everyone for all 3 days. The scripts for each day is of course different from day to day so we get shots from all angles and don’t repeat ourselves. And I updated all the scripts every day at Parken because you learn what works and what doesn’t. I will save the details of the planning and photography for another article, but let me just tell you, 5 photographers and 3 concerts results in a giant spreadsheet 🙂 It is schizophrenic and a lot of work to both be the manager and also one of the photographers, but I have a lot of experience in that now and have learned to switch over the brain from admin to creative once the music starts! It is also extremely satisfying to coach a team and now, when I scroll down this essay, it makes me extremely proud to see how well everyone in the team did and how well all our work fit together to create a whole.
This definitive essay started with more than 600 combined favourites, I culled it down to about 120 and organised them in chronological order. Not an easy task because there are so many great pictures! You can scroll down and experience the concert as it happened, for every song you get to see what the team were seeing from all corners of the stadium. All the pictures have the ‘MINDS Parken 2024 color and texture’ grade applied, a unique look we designed so the pictures would all have a similar look and feel matching the brutalist stage design and colour scheme of the concert. I love how this works both on MINDS instagram and in this essay. Grading all the combined stills from a concert like it was a movie, shaping it into a coherent whole is something I loved and want to do again.
This is a gigantic essay but it needs to be! Please view this on a laptop or tablet, anything with a big screen. Play your favourite MINDS songs and time travel with us back to Parken. It’s time for Niels Brandt to walk on stage and for the crowd to go wild, the photo team is in position, here we go!
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Thank you so much Malthe, Anna, Morten and Kasper for your fantastic pictures, being part of the team and awesome to work with. Let’s do it again! Oh and here’s our band picture!
Links: Anna Borgkvist Web+IG, Kasper Krupsdahl Web+IG, Malthe Ivarsson Web+IG, Morten Rygaard FB+IG
The End. And thank you dear reader!
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