A Camp Flog Gnaw Photo Series: “Can you draw your favourite animal?”

A Camp Flog Gnaw Photo Series: "Can you draw your favourite animal?"

October 11, 2025

Written and Photographed by Jet Bailey (@jetlag)

It’s November 14th, 2024. My two friends, Koby and Ben, and I are sat around a kitchen table in my brother’s apartment in Los Angeles, all running off a few hours of sleep. Our last bits of energy are fueled by Sourdough Burgers from Jack in the Box: one without bacon… one without sauce… one with extra sauce… We’re scheming.

It’s the day before we attend the Camp Flog Gnaw festival as Media, and earlier in the day we received an email with a spreadsheet full of artist information. The list showed every performer, whether they were open to being interviewed, and if so, who to contact.

All of our laptops are open, each tabbed into a shared Google Doc titled “EMAIL PITCH”. We need to find a way to convince the artists of Flog Gnaw that we’re interesting enough to interview them. The document stays empty for a while. Occasionally a sentence is added, then removed, then added again, then rewritten, then deleted, until eventually we have a fully crafted email to send.

It reads:

“Hi ____,

Welcome to Day 1 of FLOG GNAW!

We at Front Row would love to take a few minutes to talk to your artist _____. We’re not looking to rehash questions commonly found online. The goal is to showcase a more candid side of _____ that may not get the chance to shine in conventional interviewing.

With us is Jet Bailey, a photographer better known online as Jetlag.

His services will be complimentary, in that any photos taken will be stylized and delivered the same day for your free use.

Here are some examples of his work for reference.

We’ll be conducting interviews on the grounds all weekend and are willing to work within your schedule.

If you’re interested, please reply to this email and we’ll get back to you ASAP.

Thank you!”

“It’s perfect. Not much more we can add,” says Ben.

“I really like it. Someone’s got to bite,” I say.

“It’ll do,” says Koby, as he begins sending each email off, swapping out “_____” for the name of the respective artist. Thirty emails later, we close our laptops and turn in for the night.

It’s 8:00 a.m., the morning of November 15th. We’re all awake and eager to see who we have on the schedule to interview.

Only two responses sit in our inbox: one from Wisp’s team, and one from RAYE’s, both politely declining.

The festival gates open at 9:00 a.m. We have two hours to figure out a way to make these artists want to talk to us, or at least give us ten seconds of their time.

I don’t remember exactly how the idea came to be, but after about twenty minutes of scheming we landed on a plan that would take less than a minute of anyone’s day. No scheduled interview, no setup, no overthinking — just a single question:

“Can you draw your favourite animal for us?”

We quickly rushed to a nearby CVS, grabbed a pack of coloured Sharpies, a pad of paper, and a basting brush to tape the microphone onto.

It worked.

The first person we ran into was Nak El Smith.

“Can you draw your favourite animal for us?”

He smiled, picked up a red Sharpie from the batch, and started drawing. In a few quick strokes, a bird appeared, flying above a skyline.

“Can you give it a name?” Ben asked.

“Lil Bro,” he said, writing the name under it’s tail.

That moment lit a fire in us. Something so simple could create such a genuine exchange with artists we admired, and each drawing became a small piece of memory we could hold onto. We kept going, one by one, collecting stories through sketches.

Rio Amor had just finished her DJ set opening the festival and was still in the media area, answering a rotation of questions from nearby interviewers.

“What got you into music?”

“What’s your favourite genre?”

“Do you know Tyler the Creator?”

“Do you play any instruments?”

When the crowd around her began to thin, we stepped in with ours.

“Can you draw your favourite animal for us?”

Her face immediately lit up. She picked a blue Sharpie and drew a shark with quick, confident lines.

“Can you give it a name?”

“His name is… Jonathan. He’s non-binary,” she said, then wrote Jonathan (they/them) in bold letters above it to ensure his identity was known.

I don’t remember the exact order of everyone we met after that, but by the end of the weekend, we had a collection of twelve drawings.

Amelia Moore drew a cat named Skinny.

Tommy Richman drew a chimpanzee named Franklin.

Action Bronson drew a Chupacabra named Jerry Baklava.

Jasper Dolphin drew an orca named Lisa.

Omar Apollo drew a hamster named Omar Apollo.

Laila! drew a lion named Lili the Lion, inspired by her pet cat.

Rakeem Miles drew what looked like a cat-dog hybrid named Charles.

LEFT BRAIN drew a sea horse named Seabizkit, “like Limp Bizkit” he said proudly before speaking in depth about why he loved sea horses so much. He explained how fascinated he was by the way seahorses carry and give birth to their young in hundreds and how the beauty and strangeness always stuck with him. Later that day, a fan saw the drawing online and got Seabizkit tattooed on their arm.

That was the moment we realized how far an idea so small could reach.

And then there was Nardwuar, who wrote “To Ben: Doot Doo!” when asked to draw his favourite animal. We’re still not sure what it is. I’m sure he knows ours.

By the end of Camp Flog Gnaw, our Sharpies were nearly dry and our pad of paper was thin. Each drawing told its own story: quick, imperfect, human. What started as a desperate attempt to get a few interviews became one of the most memorable experiences of the weekend for us.

Sometimes the best ideas aren’t planned. They’re finalized in a CVS, somewhere between exhaustion and inspiration, right before the gates open.