Eilon Paz portraits of collectors with their vinyl collections

This morning at the It’s Nice That office we’ve been listening to Editor Liv Siddall’s “Dad Car Mixtape”’ which includes all the greats like U2 and B.B King and The Kinks. It therefore seems kind of like fate that we stumbled across Eilon Paz’s blog Dust & Grooves, an incredible archive of photographs and interviews with record collectors from around the world. The pictures are refreshingly natural and celebratory, and the collections documented are not too Dad-rock or nostalgic at all. Instead they’re unusual and surprising, kind of like Steve Buscemi’s immaculate collection in Ghost World.

Eilon is a record collector himself, and through years spent scouring the narrow and dark isles of dusty vinyl shops in New York, he began to find a network of other record enthusiasts around the city, who he decided to photograph and write stories about. Eilon’s archive of collectors has rapidly grown, and he’s now met and photographed an impressive 130 of them, including DJ Scruff with his towering library of records in Manchester, and Alessandro Benedetti from Italy, who boasts the Guinness World Record for the biggest collection of vinyl. Like all of the best collectors, Eilon is still on the hunt for new stories, and looking through the treasure trove of where he’s been and who he’s met and the places he’s found, it’s easy to say that Eilon has accumulated quite a collection.