Music and photography

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
 To demonstrate many of the points I would use a photograph by Ernst Haas as a reference. Although not taken at a performance it is taken at an event. It clearly demonstrates the power of photography. The event is the return of Austrian prisoners of war to Vienna. No amount of sitting through newsreels of this event could convey to the viewer more meaning than this photograph. As a photograph we have time to contemplate this moment, to come back to it time and again. (I would have to say something of the nature of each person interpreting everything through their own experiences. How we cannot be taught the things we do not already know)
 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.
 I would link my idea of the “Harmony” of the elements to Cartier-Bresson’s Decisive moments ".
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. 
 Thanks again for your birthday wishes.

Comments

  1. 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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