Colin Greenwood's photo book reaches Argentina in Spanish

Cómo desaparecer. Un retrato de Radiohead, the Spanish edition of Colin Greenwood's photo book How to Disappear, has arrived in Argentina, and Roque Casciero has gone through it for Página|12. Sexto Piso published it in Spain in 2024, a 136-page hardback at 29.90 euros.

Colin is in only two of his own pictures. In one he is playing bass. In the other, taken in the band's studio in 2014, he is a reflection in the side of a piano, camera in hand, while Thom Yorke, Jonny Greenwood and Ed O'Brien look his way. The five are never together in one frame; the book catches some of them at work on stage and in studios, or in transit on roads and in airports.

Most of the photographs date from 2003 onwards, after OK Computer, Kid A and Amnesiac, the stretch Colin calls our middle years: all the joy and doubt and confidence and uncertainty we would oscillate between⁴.

The title is the Kid A song “How to Disappear Completely” without its last word. In Spanish, Página|12 points out, the same song had already given Mariana Enríquez, the Argentine novelist, the title of her 2004 novel Cómo desaparecer completamente.

Most of the book was shot on a Yashica T4 Super, a small black film camera Tim Barber recommended. Colin credits Barber's online gallery Tiny Vice, which Barber started in 2005, with teaching him how to make an event of a casual picture. On stage he keeps his cameras on his speaker cabinet and picks one up when his hands are off the bass. The sound and the lights around the band keep attention off the camera, and give him unguarded moments.

He is shy with a camera, he writes. I'm not there to take pictures and sometimes I find it tricky to navigate the distinct roles of musician and photographer³. One of his biggest regrets is not having been bolder with it, getting closer and taking more pictures.