Photographing Nine Inch Nails – Jonathan Rach

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ARTIST TALK – 19/10/24 – Behind The Gallery, London

Jonthan Rach’s exhibition of photographs presents Trent Reznor and Nine Inch Nails at the turning point of fame and notoriety as they spent two years touring the world following the release of 1994’s The Downward Spiral.

The exhibition brings together iconic and new unseen photographs by Jonathan Rach, taken between 1994-1996. They present the brutal force of Nine Inch Nails as a live unit, set alongside the fragility of Trent Reznor at his most vulnerable, two extremes which Rach sees as the difference between the infamous shot of Reznor kicking the teeth out of a Yamaha DX-700 keyboard and the haunting projection of a child’s face smothering the solitary singer which would later become the live music video of “Hurt”.

Jonathan Rach Nine Inch Nails

The new photographs were unearthed from a box stuffed with tour T-shirts hidden under the stairs at Rach’s mother’s house, they reveal unseen aspects of the first and successive Self-Destruct tours. Encouraged by curator, Stephen Dallimore from Behind The Gallery, we see fifty of Rach’s Nine Inch Nails photos, with yet more still hidden in the archives.

Jonathan Rach Nine Inch Nails

Many of the images show Reznor in aggressive postures that resemble the static physicality of classical sculptures: jumping, reaching, roaring into the microphone, but also express the deep fraternity of the band, alongside Rach, who formed a mutual bond of shared travel, boredom and excitement that only a touring rock band could understand after two years on the road. 

Jonathan Rach Nine Inch Nails

As the success of The Downward Spiral album continued, each leg of the tour grew to meet public demand, shifting from clubs to theatres to arenas, adding pressure Trent Reznor and his bandmates as they tried sustain the energy of each show. Jonathan would refer to the growing sense of the “wheels coming off”, in the aftermath of each show, Rach compared the mass destruction of the stage and the band’s equipment to the fallen pins on a bowling alley, scattered and divided, only for them to be reset again for the next night. This precarious state of high intensity and gradual collapse seemed to excacerbate the self-loathing and depression explored on The Downward Spiral, now coming to the surface in real life, further complicated by addictions that would overwhelm Reznor in the aftermath of The Fragile in 1999.

Jonathan Rach Nine Inch Nails

Rach also turns his lens onto the audience to show the committed and passionate fanbase that brought Nine Inch Nails closer to the top of the charts and saw them become an iconic band in the emergence of America’s alternative nation that would come to dominate pop culture by the late Nineties.

READ – WE ARE THE PIGS – NINE INCH NAILS AT WOODSTOCK 1994

Jonathan describes how he first worked in rock hospitality at college, once exiting a gridlocked stadium gig under police escort in order to purchase the necessary makings for hot fudge sundaes that would satisfy the cravings of Pink Floyd. He later met Trent at an LA studio, presenting him with stage designs that included rubber backdrop scarred with sutured wounds deemed too fragile and flammable for use in live shows.

Jonathan Rach Nine Inch Nails

They bonded over a shared childhood raised in Pennsylvania, with Rach from Pittsburgh to Reznor’s small-town Mercer. Rach was invited along as a “fly on the wall” to help document the upcoming Self-Destruct Tour that would cover several major European cities in three weeks, more travelling than Rach had ever done before. He said ‘yes’ and would film much of the Closer tour film that would arrive on VHS in 1995, and with the encouragement of legendary black and white high contrast rock photographer Anton Corbijn, benefiting from the open-minded perspective of youth, Rach set out with basic camera equipment and experimented with chromatic film and stark, grainy black and white shots aimed at capturing the most light as he continued to take photographs of Nine Inch Nails at every live show.

Jonathan Rach Nine Inch Nails

Rach remembers watching Reznor playing ‘spaghetti round up’, running around the band with his mic cable, corraling them together like a noose before he tried to trip up the whole band, jumping into Chris Vrenna’s drumkit as he valiantly tried to continue playing, tackling Robin Finck during a guitar solo, then being tackled in return, and every night without fail tossing his mic stand high up into the air, but generally avoiding serious injury. Backstage after one show with the curtain already dropped, Rach saw Reznor kicking out every set of stage lights costing $50,000 dollars even though there was no-one else there to see it.

Jonathan Rach Nine Inch Nails

Keen to show the band at their best and avoid capturing rare sensationlist moments that would not reflect the spirit of the tour, Rach learnt to be invisible and developed a sense of when to turn the camera off. Nonetheless he captured Nine Inch Nails at an unsustainable peak, with Trent Reznor on a creative and personal high, as he pushed himself and his instruments to their limit.

At the end of his talk Jonathan Rach and Stephen Dallimore mentioned the ongoing tour of the exhibition to Japan and the US, and alluded to the possibility of a photo book revealing further exclusive shots from Rach’s archives – inviting a large cheer from the audience. For fans of Nine Inch Nails and anyone with an interest in live rock photography, Jonathan Rach’s work evokes a now iconic and legendary period of early 1990s music and puts the fans back thirty years into the moments that formed of a crucial period in ongoing evolution of Trent Reznor and Nine Inch Nails.

Jonathan Rach

Behind The Gallery – Nine Inch Nails

Jonathan Rach Nine Inch Nails

If you enjoyed this article, please check out more of my writing in my book about the creation of Nine Inch Nails’s The Downward Spiral – Into The Never

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