Spirit in the Light: Photographing Springsteen 1973-75 James Fuller

• Unseen Moments: Never-before-published photographs that capture Springsteen’s raw energy.
• A Celebration of Growth: Witness his evolution as an artist, from conquering a college crowd to lighting up the stage at the start of his Born to Run tour.
• World-Class Craftsmanship: 45 photos meticulously drum-scanned, with duo-tone printing by Puritan Press to ensure every image leaps off the page.
• Professional Design Ace Creative’s design and editing bring the story to life with drama and elegance.
  This is a hard-covered, limited edition of only 2000 books, and we expect it to sell out.

A photo album of concerts from the earliest years of Bruce Springsteen’s career.

Fuller’s slight coffee table book opens with page after page of black-and-white photos of a young Bruce Springsteen and his band performing at various concerts in the early 1970s: the University of Conn Spring Concert and a couple of appearances at the Geneva Theatre in upstate New York, when Fuller was an eager college student who’d just caught rock ’n’ roll fever and recently discovered Springsteen and his music.

The book’s nearly 70 pages are the pictorial record of that infatuation, up-close photos of a bearded, lithe Springsteen playing the guitar or gripping the microphone on stage, lost in the music or exchanging glances with the legendary saxophonist Clarence Clemons (“I thought of my photographs of Bruce and Clarence on stage,” he writes, “leaning against each other, dancing together, clowning around, trading solos, and making music”).

Fuller follows up these photos with 20-plus pages of text in which he chronicles both his own art (photographing the citizens of Geneva) and his experiences watching Springsteen over the years. He also provides an illustrated timeline of the years in question, from October of 1973 when he played the Geneva Theatre, through August 1974 when he finished the recording of Born to Run to October of 1975, when he appeared on the covers of both Time and Newsweek. The photos are often intimate and detailed, and the very brief autobiographical sketch in the book’s back half is equally intimate, detailing a photographer’s formative years with his favorite subject. Fuller is a talented photographer, and readers will wish there were more of his work here. His prose will also likely leave readers wanting more. He effectively dramatises the ways Springsteen’s music entranced many of those readers back in the 1970s: “The poetics of English class came alive as I became aware of Springsteen’s use of alliteration, assonance, internal rhyme, and consonance,” Fuller writes. “I realised that these concepts I was learning in my classes could be lifted and applied to the lyrics that were speaking to me at the time.” Some of these recollections can also be touching.