Photography: FO Visions
I would like to thank the many people that have remembered my birthday. Yes, it is that time of the year and I was lucky to have it on a wonderful sunny day - this is England, guys, and the weather here was foul, to say the least, until a few days ago, but warm and bright today.I spent the day doing very normal, ordinary things. A shoot for a designer's website, a visit to the gym. My son came to see me, it is always nice when he finds the time to do so.
Then I started tidying up my email box. And I found an old message from someone I used to know . It is an odd message, all about his thoughts on photographing performance and the parallels between music and photography. I am pasting it here, he raises some very interesting points.
Photographer: Martin Norris. Model: Alex B
"The question of what
is photography is an impossible one to answer. It is many things to many people
in both a utilitarian and aesthetic sense. With regards art, since the first
invention of photography, questions of photography’s place and legitimacy
within the art world have found no satisfactory conclusion. Indeed we live in a
time when art itself seems to not know itself, a time when a pickled calf can
sell for over £10,000,000. In an age
where the question is being asked “what is art?” what chance is there of coming
up with an answer in regards to a single medium?
I can go some way
however in answering the question of what photography means to me, its
strengths and weaknesses, my likes and dislikes. As a musician I draw many
parallels between music and photography. Firstly, in the true physical sense in
so far as both art forms are based upon our ability to sense waves of energy.
In music we create vibrations that both the performer and the audience find
pleasing and in photography we capture light. I am always aware as a
photographer that I do not take pictures of physical objects, only the light
that reflects off them. Incidentally something I learned in one physics lesson that
fascinated me and has always remained with me is the fact that an object
absorbs all the light that matches its own colour from the spectrum and
reflects what remains. In other words grass isn’t green but every colour but
green. When I take a picture I’m not taking a picture of what something is,
only what it isn’t.
One thing that
photography is particularly good at is capturing a moment in time. Photography
has afforded us the ability to stop the continuum of time and observe and
contemplate a single moment as seen through the eyes of the photographer and if
he or she is worth anything as an artist then that image will have meaning and
produce an emotional response. A question that requires an answer from me at
the moment is why photography is a good medium for documenting performance? It
is precisely this nature of freezing time which makes photography such a good
tool for the job.
If one is to document
a performance, especially a community based performance it has to be
viewed in its context. From my own experience of playing in the Brazilian
Carnival and more recently with the Berbers in Morocco I understand how
important the contextual element is and in no way should this be
underestimated. I spent years listening and studying the minutiae of field
recordings but it wasn’t until I saw these performances in situation did I
really begin to gain an insight into their true significance and meaning. It is my argument that in the right hands
photography is the best medium for capturing performance, its context and
greater meaning as a whole. A performance is a work of art and I believe that
only another art form has the power and ability to convey to the viewer
something of emotional response that is felt from experiencing the performance
first hand.
In music a single note has no meaning, it requires at least one other note either played simultaneously to give harmony or in sequence to give melody. Music does have meaning and the power to elicit strong emotional responses but a note has no meaning in isolation, it is totally dependent on what comes before and after. It
necessarily follows that all notes contain within them all possible meanings.
I believe the same applies
to photography and would use a picture by Ernst Haas to demonstrate this. The
same process that elicits an emotional response when listening to music can be
found in photography and is all to do with Harmony (not to be mistaken with
“harmonious”), Harmony in the musical sense that can contain consonance and
dissonance.
As mentioned
previously, music is merely waves of energy. One of the first things you learn
in music is that major harmony makes you feel happy and minor harmony makes you
feel sad. A wave of energy vibrating a 440 cycles per second coupled with
another wave vibrating 554.37 cycles per second gives a feeling of happiness
but couple it with a wave vibrating at 523.25 and we feel sad.
I believe the
compositional elements of a photograph behave in the same way and contribute to
whether the photograph is a pleasing composition or not. Elements within a
photograph work to give each other meaning. A photographer sees these patterns
in the apparent chaos of everyday life and captures them on film.
Photographer: Ernst Haas. Google images
The elements in this
picture, if seen in isolation are meaningless.
The joy on the
returning soldier’s face. He appears not to notice the woman, or maybe he
chooses not to; not today.
The 3 elements in the
picture, the returned, the missing and the grieving.
We look at the picture
of the missing in the same way we would look at an old picture of a relative we
have never met – trying to glean some of the essence of the life it represents.
Of the 3 main elements in this picture it is the only one that remains
unchanged by the circumstances of the war. It is a photograph within a
photograph.
(I would reference back to the point about a
single note having all possible meanings and the parallel with this “note” or
element. The original photograph was forged as a pure sound intended to
resonate in harmony with its future on a mantelpiece and passed through
generations “this is my son...” “this is my grandfather…” but in this context,
sounded against this other elements it has a very different meaning).
This photograph clearly demonstrates the power
of photography to convey so much about a situation and can be used to capture
the “context” of a performance as well as the performance itself.
Photographer: Henri Cartier-Bresson. Google images
My friend's musings end here. He never came back with a final draft - I can't even remember now what this draft was for, this goes back many years.
I would love to have your comments on this, especially the images he discusses.
Being a musician who has modeled once or twice, I tend to see the model in an image as the "performer" and the photographer as a mix of composer and recording engineer. Modeling is definitely a performance art, as much so as if the model were in front of an audience making images with his/her body. The photographer may suggest, as a conductor does to an orchestra player; but in the end it's the model making the images. And I can imagine that modeling is a very fluid art, one that progresses in time like a dance, a play or a musical performance. Viewers see only the still images; unless they are also photographers or models, they know and guess little of the time, effort and discipline that goes into each image.
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