Andy Summers. I’ll Be Watching You. Inside The Police 1980-83

Somewhere between the sound check and the encore is the dead time nobody photographs, and that is exactly where this book lives. Andy Summers, the guitarist who played on some of the most inescapable records of the early 1980s, spent The Police's peak years pointing a camera at the parts of fame the audience never saw, and the honest thing his photographs force you to weigh is whether extraordinary access is the same as an extraordinary eye.

Start with the case against. The road hands a musician a set of pictures no one else can reach, and a temptation to mistake the rarity of the vantage for the quality of the picture. Backstage corridors, hotel rooms at four in the morning, the blur of another arena filling up: the subject alone can carry a volume on the strength of who is holding the camera, and plenty of celebrity photo diaries coast on precisely that. The camera becomes a laminate pass, and the pictures inherit an interest they did not earn.

This one mostly refuses to coast, and the evidence is in the framing. The strongest images here are built, not merely grabbed. The camera reads the geometry of an empty stadium as readily as a bandmate's exhaustion, and it treats both with the same cool black-and-white attention, less interested in glamour than in the strange machinery of a touring life. The title lifts its line from the group's most famous song, and there is something apt in that act of watching, a player turning surveillance on his own surreal circumstances instead of on a lover.

The black and white is a real decision, not a default. It strips the period of its gaudy color and leaves the structure of these nights exposed, the repetition, the waiting, the sameness of one more town seen through one more window. A lesser eye would have chased the spectacle. This one keeps turning away from the stage toward the emptier, stranger frames on either side of it, and those are the ones that hold up years later.

The counterargument deserves its hearing. For every constructed frame there is a snapshot that survives only because of who stands in it, and the sequencing leans on the reader's affection for the group to supply meaning the picture alone would not. Anyone indifferent to the band will feel that gap. The photography is genuinely good in bursts and merely documentary in the stretches between, and pretending otherwise would flatter it. A working photographer will spot the difference on the first pass, and will not begrudge it.

So the reading lands in the middle, where a measured one should. What survives is the vantage rendered with more care than the genre usually earns, a private record of a public spectacle made by someone inside it who could actually see. He was not a bystander handed a laminate. He was a working part of the machine, photographing his own strange life as it ran, and that doubling gives the work a charge no hired outsider could manufacture. The volume is finally a document of a vantage, not a portfolio of masterpieces, and it is stronger for knowing which it is.

Which leaves the harder thing unsettled, the one the pages keep circling without landing on. When the person behind the camera is also the person the crowd paid to see, whose life is the document really, and who is watching whom?