Interview by Adrian Hextall
After a 12-year odyssey spanning continents and dodging global lockdowns, a visionary photographer brings the secret lives of rock’s most iconic instruments to life. We go behind the lens of an exhibition that’s more than just pictures—it’s a pilgrimage.
A guitar is never just wood and wire. It’s a confidante, a weapon, a vessel for heartache and ecstasy. It’s the tool that channels the riff that saves a million souls. For every iconic guitarist, there is an equally iconic instrument, scarred and sanctified by years on the road, in the studio, and in the heart of the storm. But we, the fans, usually only see them from a distance, a flash of colour under stage lights. We rarely get to see the soul.
Australian photographer Kane Hibberd has changed that. His staggering exhibition, SCALE, currently commanding reverence in a Shoreditch, London gallery, is the culmination of a 12-year obsession. It presents 100 life-sized portraits of some of music’s most legendary guitars, from Sir Paul McCartney’s legendary Höfner bass to the graffiti-bombed ‘Blue’ of Green Day’s Billie Joe Armstrong. Shot from directly above against a stark white background, the instruments float with an almost spiritual presence. The effect is profound; the shadows make them pop, creating a three-dimensional illusion so convincing you feel you could reach out, lift one from the wall, and strike a chord.
This is the closest most of us will ever get to these sacred relics, and the intimacy is breathtaking. For Hibberd, this project has been a marathon of passion, perseverance, and punishing logistics. It’s a story as compelling as those told by the instruments themselves.
The Twelve-Year Itch
This wasn’t a project born overnight. For more than a decade, SCALE was Hibberd’s “baby in the background,” a quiet obsession growing in scope and ambition while he continued his day job as a celebrated music photographer. By the end of 2019, he thought he was done.
“I basically had what I thought was going to be a finished exhibition,” Hibberd recounts, his voice a mix of exhaustion and excitement. After what he believed was his final US trip, he had captured around 260 instruments. “I thought, right, 2020 will be the year that I’ll get everything ready and we’ll work on getting an exhibition up and running.”
Then came the “dreaded C word.” The world shut down, and Hibberd, based in Melbourne, found himself in one of the world’s longest lockdowns. The exhibition was on ice. But instead of killing the project, the enforced pause paradoxically allowed it to breathe and expand. “Over COVID, just from me doing interviews with people, all of a sudden, all these new lines of communications opened up for potential guitars,” he explains. The collection grew. What was once 260 became over 300. The finish line had moved.
The final push was a flurry of activity that stretched into 2024. One of the last-minute additions, now hanging in the London gallery, was a guitar belonging to Blink-182’s Tom DeLonge. “I’d actually shot a different guitar for him back in 2019,” Hibberd recalls with a wry laugh. “And then when I went to do the interview with him in 2022, he gave me a story about a completely different guitar! So then I was chasing that guitar around the world because Blink were on tour. Nothing is ever easy.”
More Than a Six-String: The Stories Within
That chase is central to the magic of SCALE. These aren’t just portraits; they are illustrated archives of rock and roll folklore. Each image is accompanied by an audio narration—a concise version by the BBC’s Daniel Carter and a deep-dive storyteller version by Australian broadcaster Mel Bampton—that unlocks the instrument’s secret history.
Take Billie Joe Armstrong’s guitar. We’ve all seen the front, covered in stickers and punk-rock defiance. But Hibberd’s photograph reveals the back, where a tiny, faded picture is affixed. It’s a photo of a 10-year-old Billie Joe receiving that very guitar from his mother. It’s a gut-punch of personal history you’d never see from the front row. “Little things like that made all the difference,” Hibberd reflects.
The stories are as varied as the instruments. There’s the tale of Peter Buck’s Rickenbacker, held for ransom by what was likely the thief himself, leading to a police sting to retrieve the R.E.M. axeman’s prized possession. Then there’s the jaw-dropping saga of Peter Frampton’s 1954 Les Paul Custom, the ‘Phenix’.
“That’s one where you should have listened,” Hibberd teases, knowing many might walk past the Frampton print. The guitar, central to his work with Humble Pie and the multi-platinum Frampton Comes Alive!, was presumed destroyed in a 1980 cargo plane crash in South America. The plane, carrying the band’s gear, crashed on takeoff and burst into flames. Thirty-one years later, an email arrived. A luthier in Curaçao, a huge Frampton fan, had been given a burnt, damaged Les Paul to repair. He took it apart and knew instantly what it was. It had been looted from the wreckage. After another two years of careful negotiation, the guitar was returned to Frampton, who keeps its scars as a testament to its fiery rebirth. He calls it The Phenix.
These are the tales that elevate SCALE from a gallery show to a historical document. “The whole project, it’s almost like an archive,” Hibberd muses. “Documenting these stories that are intrinsically linked to each guitar, which kind of might get lost over time.”
The Art and Agony of the Shot
Creating this unified archive was a monumental technical and logistical challenge. To ensure every guitar was presented on equal terms, Hibberd devised a meticulous process. Each instrument was laid on a giant sheet of white paper, with a custom-built rig holding his camera directly overhead. The lighting had to be perfect and, crucially, identical for every single shoot.
“It was really important to have everything looking uniform so that when you’re in the exhibition, you really notice the contrast between each guitar,” he says. “The lighting and everything allows you to see the guitar like every other guitar, but then as you look around, you start noticing the different sizes and the different shapes.”
Achieving this consistency while crisscrossing the globe was a nightmare. He travelled with two cases of gear, but the main camera support—a hefty boom stand—had to be hired in each city. “That meant that I drove a lot of places,” he says. “If I flew into somewhere like Chicago, then I would drive anywhere like 10 to 12 hours in that vicinity if I needed to.”
The scheduling was even harder. Artists are notoriously difficult to pin down. “I’d be coming to America with maybe one or two guitars scheduled and everyone else would say, ‘Let me know when you’re on the ground,’” he reveals. “There’s a few trips where I went where I was like, I don’t even know if I’m going to shoot a guitar.”
The commitment was tested. A disastrous trip in 2016 yielded only two guitars in three weeks. Broke and demoralised, Hibberd wondered if it was time to quit. “My brain was kind of telling me, ‘Nah, you probably shouldn’t do this,’ but there was something in my gut which just kept on saying, ‘Keep going, keep going.’” Heeding that gut feeling, he persevered, eventually finding a patron in 2018 who helped fund the final, crucial trips.
That perseverance paid off. When asked for his personal favourite in the London collection, Hibberd points to one of the most damaged instruments in the room: the guitar belonging to Terrie Hessels of experimental Dutch band The Ex. It’s missing a tuning peg and its headstock is worn to the bone from being dragged across stages for 40 years. “To me, that was kind of the epitome of what SCALE is,” Hibberd says. “He’s been playing it for 40 years and the more damage it gets, the more he… finds new ways of making sounds out of it. Aesthetically, it’s just so broken.” It’s a portrait of resilience, a theme that echoes through the entire project.
The Road Ahead
The reaction to the London show has been overwhelmingly positive. “We haven’t had one single bad review,” Hibberd says with relief. He notes the surprising number of ‘plus ones’—partners dragged along by music fanatics—who end up captivated. “They don’t have an emotional connection to the artist or even the guitar. They can then just enjoy the guitar as a beautiful… you know, the sleek lines and the craftsmanship… and they really enjoyed the stories as well.”
With AEG now on board as a promotional partner, the future for SCALE is bright. The exhibition is set to tour the world, with potential stops across America, Canada, and Europe. Each new city may see a slightly different curation, keeping the experience fresh while retaining cornerstone pieces like McCartney’s bass and Brian May’s “Red Special.”
And for those who can’t make it, a comprehensive book is planned for late 2026. It will be the definitive collection, but Hibberd admits there are still a few holy grails he’s chasing. “Tony Iommi and Dolly Parton and Bonnie Raitt and Angus Young,” he lists. “Now that it’s out and it’s a physical thing, not just this PDF document… we’re going to give it a little bit of time to hopefully pick up a couple of more people.”
Imagine it: Tony Iommi’s ‘Old Boy’ SG, the very instrument that forged the sound of heavy metal, joining the collection just after Black Sabbath’s final bow. It’s tantalising prospects like these that prove SCALE is a living, breathing project. It’s a testament to the enduring power of a simple object made of wood and wire, and to the artists who use them to change the world. More than that, it’s a tribute to the man who had the vision and the sheer bloody-mindedness to capture their souls.
For details click here: https://www.scale-exhibition.com/
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