From the Kickstarter campaign:

My name is Tanya Kang. I am a photographer and the founder of the Pearl Jam Fan Portraits project.

I wouldn’t be where I am today without Pearl Jam’s music and I know that’s how many Pearl Jam fans feel. 2012 is when I came up with the Fan Portraits idea. I wanted to do something to capture how much the music means to all of us, and that’s what I started doing with Fan Portraits. I started taking photos of fans holding a sign with lyrics at the shows. It started small and grew into something more than I ever could have imagined. By the 2018 tour, I had captured over 1,000 fans. Now ten years since it inception, I’m finally ready to print the book and I can’t do it without your support.

Between 2012 and 2018, I traveled to as many cities and states as possible on each tour to capture as many fans as I could. It was a true labor of love: taking photos all day, going to the show that night, traveling on to the next show the following day, and taking red eye flights to make it back in time to work my day job.

One of the most rewarding things to come out of working on this project is all the amazing fans that I got to meet along the way. I heard so many inspiring stories that I decided to compile the portraits and some of these stories into a collection.

I’ve been working on the book over the last few years with some pauses along the way (having my son in 2020 is one of them!). Thanks to encouragement from several close friends I met at the shows, I was finally able to find the time to finish the book. Now I need your help to get the book printed. I’m so excited to share the portraits with you and I can’t wait for you to see the collection come together in this book. Photos are meant to be printed and the images can be truly appreciated this way – it’s a beautiful thing. I want the book to be more than a coffee table decoration – I want it to be something you pick up again and again.

As I’ve worked on the book, it’s been a trip down memory lane: remembering each person’s photo that I took, learning about their story, the journey they took to get to the concert, how much it meant to them to have their photo captured, what the lyrics meant to them, and hearing about the hours they spent (or weeks!) deciding which lyric to go with. Meeting new people at each show, hanging outside the venue discussing what the setlist will be and if they will play the song from your Fan Portrait, hanging out after and talking about the amazing show we just witnessed. These are the sentiments that will resonate with you as you flip through the pages of this book.