page: 138
 title: Anthony Mandler Exposes Another Side Of TOOL
author: Christopher Scapelliti


You've just been asked to shoot one of metal's fastest-rising 
bands for a cover story in a national magazine. There's just 
one little hitch: The group doesn't like to be photographed. 
And, by the way, you can't show the band members' faces. 
Such were the daunting terms Anthony Mandler agreed to 
when he shot this image of Tool for Spin's June 2001 issue.
Lateralus, the group's 2001 release, had just been recorded, 
and Tool -- Danny Carey, Adam Jones, Justin Chancellor, and 
Maynard James Keenan -- were in Maine finishing up the mix 
when Mandler caught up with them. Jones quickly laid out the 
ground rules for him.
"He wanted to make sure that, whatever ideas I came up 
with, I'd protected the integrity of the band," says 
Mandler. "You know, that I wasn't gonna throw them in a 
grimy hallway and shoot them, like Staind. That thing works 
for bands that have a definite image. But Tool are, I think, 
the pioneers of the anti-image; the more you reveal of them, 
the more it detracts from what they are."
For this photo, Mandler veiled the group with a pane of 
frosted glass. "I came up with the idea of creating an opaque 
wall," says the photographer. "I wanted to create the sense 
of another world -- another space -- behind the glass, a 
sense that the viewer was getting a piece of the puzzle but 
not the whole thing."
Mandler wasn't certain how the group would react to the shot. 
Jones, for all his preliminary directives, likes to speak "in 
abstract therms" says Mandler. "I had to go to my friend 
James Hawkinson" -- a cinematographer who had worked with 
Tool videos --" to learn how to talk to the group in their 
language, so that we could figure out between us what the 
images should be."
And then there was the unpredictable Keenan. "We didn't 
know if Maynard was gonna show up in drag, or in kabuki 
make-up," Mandler says, laughing. "But it turned out great, 
and the guys loved the photo's. To this day, it's one of the 
most challening shoots I've ever done. 
Posted to t.d.n: 12/26/03 05:03:35