JIM ROSEMBERG
About our interviews: we don’t ask questions, we listen to stories.
Interview and photographs: Andrei Runcanu @andreiruncanu
Jim Rosemberg is a French photographer and director specialised in fashion, portrait and travel. He worked for clients like Cacharel, Christian Dada, Pimkie, Karl Lagerfeld. While shooting video for Double Sens, a tourism company that promotes a more durable type of toursim, based on exchange, he travelled around the globe to countries like Cambodia, Benin, Peru, Vietnam. On top of that, for the past ten years Jim has been an accomplished musician. He used to be the lead singer of Balinger and now he’s working on his first solo album.
Jim is a close friend of mine, I hear his stories all the time. I wish I could remember them all. He was visiting me in Romania for a few days that were pretty full. We went to two concerts, one of them by the amazing Nick Cave, we went to bars, restaurants, we even saw a doctor at some point. And in his last day in Bucharest we went out to grab some sushi in a restaurant that has tables on the sidewalk. I was going to interview him. He knew about STORY OF since it was just an idea. He knew that for the interviews there would be no questions. And still, when I took out my phone and started voice recording, he says "are you going to ask me some questions"? "No questions. Just stories," I say. He looks at me a little shocked, like I was cornering him. But it doesn't take him more than a few seconds and he tells me about one of his concerts, organized by a friend of his brother in Benin.
"The concert was in the first day of my trip to Benin. As soon as we got to the airport, we got our luggage and our guide, the guy who was following us throughout the trip, said <<We need to start with a drink>>. So we went to a bar just next to the airport and we had three Mojitos, but I already had two whiskeys on the plane. So it's 9:30-10PM, I'm already starting to be a little bit drunk, I haven't eaten anything during my ten hours flight. We get to the bar, the owner goes <<Hey, welcome>> and gives me two cocktails. Then I see these African musicians. I thought I was supposed to sing by myself, do a few songs, then jam. But no, I had to sing with these guys, one of which was too stoned to be able to sing. I tell them I need to eat something, but this rasta guy asks me if I want to smoke. So there I am, already absolutely drunk, I'm about to play with people I don't know in front of a big crowd, I'm tired, hungry and I'm smoking with the bass player and the rasta guy while people are waiting for me to go on stage". He then describes this crazy experience where the stoned bass player would never change the notes during the whole concert and whenever Jim would give him signals to change the tune, he would just smile, act very happy and continue to play the same exact notes.
I knew I didn't have to be prepared for this interview, the stories would just flow one after another. I got to find out how he became a photographer and a videographer: by pretending that he knew stuff that he had no idea about. He was just taking analogue pictures of his friends and family, developing the films by himself, but nothing more than that. And then someone saw his pictures and asked him if he knows how to shoot a fashion lookbook and he said "yes, of course". "I had never taken any fashion pictures or with flash or whatever. I had never worked with artificial lights in my life. And the shooting was like in three days or something. So I had some money put aside and I went and bought some lights. The shooting went well and that was my first regular client. And with video it was kind of the same. Someone said <<Do you do backstage video?>>, <<Yes, of course I do>>. And I had never done that in my life".
And since we got to talk about beginnings, he takes me back to his first concert, when he was 18 years old. "Back then I was singing R&B with a friend from former Zaire. He got us a gig at a Zairian music festival and we were supposed to sing in front of around five thousand or... twenty thousand people, like a massive thing. We were supposed to sing three songs. We had a friend that made some t-shirts for us, we had things written on them. There was a lot of pressure. And we get there, the weather was crap, and we realize there is no one, there are basically ten people, or twenty people. And there was a delay of three hours. And like it wasn't enough, it suddenly starts raining. And I see the sound engineer covering his soundboard with a bed sheet. With a fucking bed sheet! So of course the soundboard got wet and when it stopped raining, the thing wasn't working anymore and had to be replaced. In the end we started singing with a four hours delay and with no sound check. With a delay like that even my friends and family left. There was almost no one left. We sang in front of twenty people, when we expected twenty thousand. So that was my first experience with concerts, my introduction to live music". He then adds "mmm, this sushi is delicious" like that story had no weight attached to it, like it never affected him.
Later that day he would be in a plane flying back to Paris. Maybe drinking whiskey, maybe being late, forgetting something, meeting someone, taking a picture or maybe humming a Nick Cave song. Or maybe someone next to his seat asks him the craziest question, like if he knows how to fly a rocket into space because they really need a pilot. And Jim goes "yes, of course".
