10.19.2007

Music to Photography


Music is imagination, critical thought, idiosyncratic and recycling. Photography is painting with light. Writing is a release. Composition is the all-inclusive whole of my life. Art is deconstruction.

I have been focusing on music as of late because the reason I am a photographer today is because I played music yesterday. I stand behind the tripod more as a guitar player than a photographer. I revere my compositional history further than I respect the camera that I look through and hold. The camera has always been a piece of equipment to me. For some unknown rationale the guitar or paint brush or a pen has more compositional value and greater life than a piece of equipment. Nonetheless, I respect the light that I gleam through the viewfinder. I find photography to be an inexhaustible passion of who I am today.

Photography is the documentation of life caught in that instant flash. My history is what I see and feel when I raise the camera to my eye. All the knowledge and expertise that came before that photo is captured and released when I fire the shutter.

Early studies in music are memories that have never left me. In second grade I took drum lessons from a man who taught me the foundation of how to hold a stick and how to strike the practice pad. The repetitions and basic skills that were taught to me have developed into the foundation for all future compositional practices. Next in life I discovered the guitar and then I found God. Creation, evolution, beginning and end all made sense to me. The guitar strings have the answers to the universe in them. String vibrations are life. Six strings, a piece of wood and an endless mystery. Writing songs made me feel like a creator. Having people respond to my songs made my ego grow. Hearing my songs on the radio made my ego explode. Constantly, meeting somebody who plays better than me kept me alive and my ego caged.

Why photography professional and not music? I have a natural eye for photography and not a natural ear for music. Perfect pitch is not one of the disciplines that I developed but a natural eye for compositional balance is a gift that has been given to me. Photography is all-encompassing of how I live my life. The minimalist, ambient, documentation approach I developed for my photography is made up by the music I have practiced, the books that I have read and words that I have written down.

The narrative and architecture of past music is the inspiration I stand on today. Hallucinations of sounds play in my head; visions of cropping, lighting, color contrast fill my mind eyes. From a guitar I became a photographer, with a bow of gratitude I will continue the practice.