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Can you combine music and photography?

Rick Otto

New member
I'm a blues guitarist - I'm a photographer.. Sometimes, when looking at an image I want to capture, I hear the blues.... normally something moving that has a natural rhythm... Sometimes, when playing, I see a picture.. normally someone who's listening or has escaped into the sound.. .... God, I'm lucky.

Ansel Adams played the piano - black/white keyes - zone system?

Achromatic sounds like a type of lens, but it describes musical notes that occur in a scale without being changed by accidentals..

How would it be to be able to take pictures of music ?? Think of the variables.. !!

So - I dont' really care if you're using Apochromatic lenses, or playing achromatic music, it's still music to my eyes...

Rick

Nobody understands me, cept' my guitar...
 
Nobody understands me, cept' my guitar...

I do.... when I was a young kid, I thought I just might be crazy because I heard music very often where there was none... is still the same today.

So what are we? Photosicians? Mugraphers? ;) Pictures and Music, both a language...perhaps the only language I like to speak at times...

Inspired by Avatar, made this morning, fresh from my Mac so to speak (unmastered Version, still need to iron out some stuff)....

SLEEPING BANSHEE
http://dl.dropbox.com/u/4914840/sleeping_banshee.mp3
 

Ken Tanaka

pro member
Music + photography have been frequent partners for a long, long time. (I know that I sing the blues when I see many photos.)

You might be interested in the site of The Jazz Loft Project. This is a site related to a book as well as a traveling exhibition of a project that the late W. Eugene Smith undertook. The exhibit just opened at the Nasher Museum at Duke University, in case you're in the neighborhood. If not, the book/catalog is fabulous.
 

Asher Kelman

OPF Owner/Editor-in-Chief
Music + photography have been frequent partners for a long, long time. (I know that I sing the blues when I see many photos.)

You might be interested in the site of The Jazz Loft Project. This is a site related to a book as well as a traveling exhibition of a project that the late W. Eugene Smith undertook. The exhibit just opened at the Nasher Museum at Duke University, in case you're in the neighborhood. If not, the book/catalog is fabulous.

A great link. I learned a lot. What a commitment Eugene Smith had. He turned his back on regular 9-5 job and family to embed himself in the scene of music, life and his photography! I wonder what happened to his family!

Asher
 

Asher Kelman

OPF Owner/Editor-in-Chief
Nobody understands me, cept' my guitar...

Well, you have a friend that won't cheat on you!

Most of my pictures involve live music. Before I photograph musicians I watch them play. Some are puzzled. I try to get to know the piece. Then I try to photograph so that I get some of that into the image. It's so hard to do. At the least I hope to get some of their energy, and if I can, their artistry too.

With dancers, that's even more challenging as there's form, music and movement. Here's a picture that for me comes alive with the music choreographed for the dancers. The music is on a you-tube site, click that to get it going on a separate browser page, then watch the ballerinas. This one picture and the haunting music has given me a lot of pleasure, reliving the live experience. I hope some of this might work for you.

Asher
 

Mark Hampton

New member
Yes

I think M Jackson made a few great works in the 80s ... Not much has been done since..

Thriller - is a good place to start ! The reading has changed but the tune still remains..

cheers
 
Music and photography, at a highly engaged level, involve intense mental activity and if both happen in the one head it's not surprising there is cross-talk. Synesthetes often report that musical notes invoke colours so the visual and auditory circuits of the brain must be close.

But there are contrary examples. I used to have eidetic memory of things seen and photography seems a natural follow on but, for the life of me, I can't fathom what people get out of music. It doesn't touch me at all. Contrarily, a friend of mine is immersed in music and his house does not contain one valued picture (album covers aside) let alone a photograph.

I truly doubt that photography informs an appreciation of music or vice versa. The two media can be pushed together but the result, like an acrobatic troupe on radio, may understate both.
 

Asher Kelman

OPF Owner/Editor-in-Chief
But there are contrary examples. I used to have eidetic memory of things seen and photography seems a natural follow on but, for the life of me, I can't fathom what people get out of music. It doesn't touch me at all. Contrarily, a friend of mine is immersed in music and his house does not contain one valued picture (album covers aside) let alone a photograph.

I truly doubt that photography informs an appreciation of music or vice versa. The two media can be pushed together but the result, like an acrobatic troupe on radio, may understate both.

Maris,

If music does not move you the way it moves the rest of us, then how could you know whether or not one informs another? There's no doubt that music informs dance and dance is a fluidly changing series of creative forms. So it's hardly surprising that for some of us there would be an immediate connection. Maybe you just need to find the right example for you. Did you try my link to Gnossienne and the dancers and find out whether or not listening to the the music while looking at the picture helped to give a sense of movement of the dancers?

Asher
 
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Ken Tanaka

pro member
A great link. I learned a lot. What a commitment Eugene Smith had. He turned his back on regular 9-5 job and family to embed himself in the scene of music, life and his photography! I wonder what happened to his family!

Asher

Smith's family life was a train wreck. He was screwed a little too tightly into himself and his work and largely abandoned his family as he moved obsessively between assignments and personal projects.

It's interesting to note that Smith was not, himself, a musician. This "jazz loft" just became like a bird feeder for him to shoot jazz musicians letting their hair down. Many of them hardly have any memory of Smith, or only remember his as a camera nut that showed -up during jam sessions.

@ Maris: To the extent that music affects many people's brain chemistry and wave patterns (which it does) it hold the potential to influence creative energies. Does it produce better photography? Naw, wrong question. It's better to state that it moves some people to create work at all. "Better" would be a judgment more aptly trained toward more considered art forms such as painting, drawing, and sculpture.
 
Smith's family life was a train wreck. He was screwed a little too tightly into himself and his work and largely abandoned his family as he moved obsessively between assignments and personal projects.

It's interesting to note that Smith was not, himself, a musician. This "jazz loft" just became like a bird feeder for him to shoot jazz musicians letting their hair down. Many of them hardly have any memory of Smith, or only remember his as a camera nut that showed -up during jam sessions.

Smith's life was a train wreck, detailed in great detail by Jim Hughes in "Shadow and Substance," still available from some used book sellers. Music was always an obsession with him. He probably carried equal amounts of 78 rpm records, whisky and cameras into the South Pacific. His friends loyally covered up some of the worst problems because, as one of them is quoted, "Smith was worth it." He set up his family in a house in Croton-on-Hudson, NY, where I lived for many years (long after he had left). People I knew there remember them well, the long hours of darkroom work, the helpers that Life and Magnum sent to see if the Pittsburgh (and other) projects could be pushed through, the efforts that it took his wife and a caregiver to make ends meet. Smith had a string of other relationships that he moved through, some of which stabilized things enough to get another book or memorable essay completed (e.g. Minamata).

Certainly not a personal role model, but awesome in his ability to see a larger picture in ordinary surroundings and show it clearly. The Pittsburgh pictures that Sam Stephenson has also gotten into print are full of this sort of life, even though Smith could never squeeze them into a single "essay".

The Sixth Avenue loft was a jazz hangout when he moved in. He gradually expanded into two floors himself and wired the whole building for tape recording.

scott
 
Hi,

fwiw. two accounts of the same piece of music can totally contradict themselves. It is strongly linked to musical experience, cultural background and of course education.

Human reactions on music differ from indifference to ecstasy. Neuroscience is getting a wee bit closer in understanding the concepts of perception.

Recent studies suggest that dopamine release plays also a strong role.

Only in early 90s brain imaging was achieved, and there are many 'computational centers' involved. Corpus Callosum (left/right connection), Motor Cortex (think tapping), Prefrontal Cortex (think expectation), Amygdala (Emotional reactions), Sensory Cortex (Think Playing or dancing) and many more, Auditory Cortex, Hippocampus, Visual Cortex, Cerebellum.

Music shapes brain development and plays a role in linguistic development such as pitch detection etc., it also can help neurological conditions.

In the second part of this free podcast Dr. G. Schlaug - Director, Music and Neuroimaging Laboratory http://www.musicianbrain.com/#index, Stroke Recovery Laboratory, and Division Chief, Cerebrovascular Diseases Associate Professor of Neurology, Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center and Harvard Medical School - shares some of his insights.

http://www.loc.gov/podcasts/musicandthebrain/index.html

In all cultures around the planet, there are other, spiritual aspects involved in musical performance and perception. While all of the above belongs into the realm of unknown, which slowly becomes known with increasing gains in neuroscience and other disciplines, these aspects belong into the realm of unknowable, and can be experienced on an individual basis only.
 
Maris,

If music does not move you the way it moves the rest of us, then how could you know whether or not one informs another? There's no doubt that music informs dance and dance is a fluidly changing series of creative forms. So it's hardly surprising that for some of us there would be an immediate connection. Maybe you just need to find the right example for you. Did you try my link to Gnossienne and the dancers and find out whether or not listening to the the music while looking at the picture helped to give a sense of movement of the dancers?

Asher

I photographed a lot of musicians back in the 1970's. This was during my temporary hand-held 35mm camera phase. Rock and roll was the go and I generated images for several bands. On occasion I would photograph during performance from the stage floor while rolling back and forth on a mechanic's creeper behind the fold-backs. Hazards included being kicked by a performer or being concussed by the sound field from the Marshall stacks. But I was only one of many photographers working with the bands. To a man (no girls then) we were interested in the excitement, the colour, and the transgressiveness of the lifestyle. As for the music itself, meh. None of us played music and the only records we were interested in were freebies that we could on-sell.

What did we read between gigs. Rolling Stone Magazine of course. Sure it had lots and lots of pictures but you could read a stack of Rolling Stones and learn little to nothing about music. You could however learn a lot about the peccadillos of musicians.

The disconnect between music and pictures seemed secure then and it seems secure now, at least in my own mind. But I have to concede that there could be exceptional people, Asher Kelman may be one, who can run pictures and music in the mind simultaneously and synergistically. What a gift that must be; an item worthy of envy.

Asher, I did look at the pictures of the dancers but they are silent for me. I see stop-action pictures of people out of gravitational balance which implies that they must in dynamic movement at the moment of exposure. I know intellectually that musical rhythm and dance rhythm go powerfully together but I neither see it or sense it.

I've become largely limited to and comfortable with the formal appreciation of static scenes photographed with a static camera. The view camera on a solid tripod chose me rather than me choosing it. That music, dance, and pictures blend into a rich enhancement of life for some people intrigues me but I think I will miss out on it. Maybe it's because photography fills my hour-glass completely, maybe it's late onset autism.
 

Rick Otto

New member
Maris,

If music does not move you the way it moves the rest of us, then how could you know whether or not one informs another? There's no doubt that music informs dance and dance is a fluidly changing series of creative forms. So it's hardly surprising that for some of us there would be an immediate connection. Maybe you just need to find the right example for you. Did you try my link to Gnossienne and the dancers and find out whether or not listening to the the music while looking at the picture helped to give a sense of movement of the dancers?

Asher

Hi Asher...

I just can't imagine not "Feeling" anything or being moved by music - I dont care if you're not a blues fan, try listening to the simple "Slo Gin" by Joe Bonnamassa..

Anyway, I went to your link in post #5 and I have to tell you that's some haunting music..
- Satie, perhaps, composed this 'for' a dance, but I had an extremely dark feeling while listening - the opposite of the beautiful visual of the dancers.. their color and beauty, contradict the black and white visuals I get when listening.. Perhaps that's OK - perhaps the contradicton is the purpose? Remember, people thought differently about music back then ....... Hell, people 'thought' back then... !

Anyway, I've been spending some time in the studio recently, but enjoyed reading some of the replies to my OP.. And - I'm impressed with the knowledgable and well spoken members we have.. This forum is .... fun.

Thanks !!

Rick
 
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