There’s a moment in In Between, the new photography book by Red Hook resident Bill Patrick, where Seth Troxler, international house music luminary, is sprawled out on an airport floor, dead to the world. The glamour of the global DJ circuit—pulsing festivals, euphoric crowds, VIP excess—is nowhere to be found. Instead, there’s exhaustion, liminality, the stark reality of a life spent in transit. And that, more than anything, is what In Between is about.
On March 22, Kingston Social will host a launch party for the book from 5:30-7:30pm, with a Q&A with Doron Gild. Camp Kingston will host an afterparty from 9pm on with Patrick, Laura Lynn, and Topher Horn taking turns DJing.
Patrick, a veteran DJ himself, spent most of 2023 traveling with Troxler, capturing moments that live outside the frame of conventional music photography. Yes, there are shots of packed dance floors and intimate behind-the-scenes portraits, but Patrick is more interested in the spaces between: the long-haul flights, the stolen moments of solitude, the texture of unfamiliar cities glimpsed in passing. Shot entirely on film, the images have a grainy, timeless quality—each frame an artifact of a life lived on the move.
The project started as a reaction to what Patrick calls “the arms race of content” in the music industry, where DJs are expected to constantly flood social media with perfectly curated images of their lives. “We wanted to do something different, something more honest,” Patrick says. The result is a book that feels more like a street photography project than a behind-the-scenes tour diary. In one image, a ballerina adjusts her pointe shoes on a sidewalk in Athens. In another, a couple bickers on a New York street corner while costumed revelers pass by on Halloween. The book captures the strange poetry of travel—the way the world outside keeps spinning, oblivious to the late nights and soundchecks happening just a few blocks away.
Patrick, who spent over a decade in Berlin before relocating to the Hudson Valley in 2020, fell into photography as a way to reclaim a sense of presence while on the road. “DJing is an intense lifestyle,” he says. “I was never a superstar DJ, more like a middle-class DJ, flying economy, doing these brutal schedules. A friend suggested picking up a film camera, and it totally changed my experience of touring.” What started as a creative outlet evolved into a full-fledged passion, culminating in In Between, which was self-published and has been making its way into independent bookshops via Patrick’s personal, door-to-door sales approach.
As if releasing his first photography book wasn’t enough of a personal milestone, Patrick has also been battling cancer—a fact he only casually drops into conversation, as if it were just another layover in a year full of them. He credits the book with giving him a sense of purpose during treatment. “The timing of everything—getting diagnosed while designing the book—it just felt like a powerful moment,” he says. “Focusing on something creative helped me get through it.”
Now, with In Between officially out in the world and nearly sold out of its limited run, Patrick is keeping busy with new projects, including shooting for Signal, a new club in New York, and continuing his ever-expanding street photography practice.
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This article appears in March 2025.
Great article