Behind the byline
Thirteen years of other people's nights
How the work splits, what I carry, and the rules I do not break.
Live work is not about the one great frame. It is about coming back with a set that reads like the night felt, and getting it to the people who need it while they still care.
I am Ravi Sandhu and I have been photographing live music since 2013, first in Salford pub back rooms and now in rooms that hold twenty thousand. Somewhere in the middle I picked up the byline Kiro, and it stuck.
The work splits three ways. Music is most of it: headline tours, festival weekends, club nights and the record launches in between. Events are the rest: conferences, awards nights and press calls, which sound like a different job but are the same one with better carpet and worse lighting. And then there is the archive, thirteen years deep, which publications license from me every week.
What people book me for is not really the pictures. It is the certainty that the pictures will be there, captioned properly, before the story goes cold. I have missed one deadline in thirteen years, and I still think about it.
- Manchester Based
- 2013 Shooting since
- 110 Nights a year
- 01 Never in the way A photographer the crowd notices is a photographer doing it wrong. I work small, quiet and out of the security team's line, and I have never had a pass pulled.
- 02 Available light, always No flash in a pit, ever, and none in a room where people paid to be. Whatever the LD gives me is what the picture is made of.
- 03 Captioned to your spec Act, venue, city, date and credit, written the way your CMS wants them. Nobody should have to retype anything.
- 04 The clock is the brief Selects within four hours, the full edit by ten the next morning, and a phone that is answered on a show day.
The rooms
Where the work happens
Not the pictures I sell. The ones that show what a night actually looks like from where I stand.
Right now
What I am in the middle of
Halden Wire, autumn run
Eleven dates from September
Digitising thirteen years of negatives
2013 to 2016, roughly half done
A twenty-frame set for the Trust's foyer
Hanging in November
Two Saturdays open in October
The rest of the autumn is spoken for
Updated 24 August 2026
The record
Credits, awards and accreditation
The working history a press office asks for, kept up to date and downloadable.
Where the work goes
2021—present
Staff photographer, live — Marrow Live (touring)
2019—present
Contributing photographer — Pennine Music Trust
2018—present
Tour photographer — Halden Wire, Marta Sena, The Ivory Bloc
2017—present
Event photographer — Northern Tech Assembly and other conferences
2013—2016
Picture desk assistant — Regional evening paper
Published in
2019-2026
Loudline — Live reviews and festival galleries
2020-2026
The Northern Review — Culture pages, live and portrait
2022-2026
Sonic Quarterly — Two cover stories and a photo essay
2021-2026
Field & Stage — Festival season coverage
2021-2026
Marrow Live press office — Tour announce and campaign sets
Awards and selections
Live Photograph of the Year, shortlist — Pennine Music Trust
Festival Portfolio, selected — Northlight Weekender
Young Music Photographer, runner-up — Loudline
Accreditation
Pit access, 41 UK and EU venues — Standing accreditation via promoters and venue press offices
2022-2026
Season pass — Northlight Weekender, Bramble Fields, three regional festivals
Public liability, 5m — Certificate on request for venue and conference paperwork
Before all this
2010—2013
BA Photography — Manchester School of Art