Nirvana Pictures

JWise Photo of the Day

Screen captures of Nirvana from a show at Ku-Ba in Hanau, Germany performed on November 18, 1989

These four screen captures are from a video Caroline and I shot back on November 18, 1989, at Club Ku-Ba in Hanau, Germany of the band Nirvana. Kurt Cobain was nice about giving us permission to tape the show, it only required a small trade. Two years after this event the band would be world-famous. I promised Nirvana that I wouldn’t bootleg the recording and so far have honored my word – not that I wouldn’t like to. I’ve asked the label who said do what I want with the images as I own them, but the music is owned by their publisher and I can’t do a thing with that. A silent video? Oh well. I’m posting this old image as some guys at a Nirvana Forum have asked for more screenshots. Don’t forget to click the image to see a larger version. By the way, that’s me down in the bottom right.

Atom Heart, Anton, Caroline, Olaf, John

JWise Photo of the Day

Uwe Schmidt aka Atom Heart, Anton - the skull, Caroline Wise, Olaf Finkbeiner and John Wise in the background in a photo from early 1990

Early in 1990, with our Digiview image digitizer connected to our Amiga 2000, we grabbed this photo of Uwe Schmidt (Atom Heart) on the left, Anton the skull, Caroline Engelhardt (to become Caroline Wise 4 years later), Olaf Finkbeiner, and that’s me, John Wise in the back row. This photo of the day prior to a recent scanning only existed on a piece of paper printed on a dot-matrix printer, the original file is lost in time. Photoshop and Neat Image helped in bringing this poor-quality image back to life.

Uwe Hamm-Furholter / Exground Filmfest

JWise Photo of the Day

Mail from Uwe Hamm-Furholter in Aldlingen, Germany telling me of The Exground Filmfest

An old friend, Uwe Hamm-Furholter, wrote me and sent this brochure for the Exground Filmfest held in Wiesbaden, Germany, for the past 18 years – he and I went to the first one back in 1988, and I got my clock cleaned by Ari Roussimoff following the Exground showing of his film Shadows in the City in 1990 or 1991. Uwe brought the likes of Nick Zedd to Germany to show his films, did some documentary work with Richard Kern, and has always had a liking for extreme films.

John Wise circa 1992

JWise Photo of the Day

John Wise 1992

This is me, John Wise, at my office in 1992 in Frankfurt, Germany. Caroline and I started producing record covers for Techno music in 1989 and eventually made many a t-shirt design, postcards, CD covers, magazine advertisements, posters, slides, and various other graphic designs, 3D modeling and animation, video, and multimedia stuff. We worked under different monikers, including:

Caroline Wise Dweeb

Dweeb, Magic Donut, 4-Eyes…

Dreamfish

…Optic Kiss,  Kommunaggresion, Intrinsic Dimension, and…

Jo Lincke in Frankfurt, Germany

…The Hippies. Prior to this, I did live concert documentary work for bands including…

…The Pixies, Nitzer Ebb, Dinosaur Jr, Front 242…

…Nirvana – (live in Hanau, Germany 1989),

The Sugarcubes, Psychic TV,  Laibach, and about 100 other bands.

Katharina and Jutta

JWise Photo of the Day

Katharina Engelhardt and Jutta Engelhardt in Germany

Please note: this post was added to my blog in 2022. Don’t mind the copyright either; Klaus Engelhardt took this photo of his daughter/our niece Katharina and her “Oma Jutta,” a.k.a. Caroline’s mom. I’m adding this for continuity as we often received photos from Germany, but for some reason or other, probably because I hadn’t taken the photo, I never included any of them here. Over time I’ll be trying to insert a couple here and there.