Music And Photography

Unlike many of the greats in photography I have absolutely no musical talent at all, perhaps this means I'm never destined for greatness. Doesn't mean I can't write about parallels between music and photography.

When listening to good music, there is a fit between notes - the following notes just make sense. It may be that it's because it's a perfect fit for the previous note(s), it might even be because it was unexpected but provides an interesting contrast to the notes before, but somehow it works. We can't explain why it works, it just does. IF we hear lesser work, the notes that follow seem to have little to do with those before. One is left with the feeling it was a mistake, that the composer didn't quite get it right, or that the following passage has absolutely nothing to do with the previous - as if you were listening to chunks of different tunes. That sense of 'rightness' just isn't there.

Well, photographs are the same way. As we move our eyes around the image, in a good photograph one part leads nicely into the next, or contrasts it in a way that works. It just feels right.

In music, the more you learn, the more combinations and sequences of notes that feel right. Had one never heard jazz, the combinations would jar and feel wrong. With more experience and perhaps a music appreciation course, one learns to look for these 'different' patterns and on hearing them they start sounding right to us.

Now, if you don't have a lot of experience and or training looking at photographs, the same situation happens. Parts of the photograph seem to 'hit the wrong note'. Problem is, sometimes it is the wrong 'note', and other times it's our own ignorance, our limited experience which limits the range of acceptable combinations of lines, curves and shapes in a photograph. Often, rather than being disturbed as one is when a wrong note is played, we simply don't see anything interesting in the photograph and dismiss it as boring.

So what does this mean to yours and my photography. I think it means that if an image is much admired by people in the know and we can't see it, the problem may be ours - lacking the experience or education to appreciate what they're seeing, maybe. But perhaps it's just a bad photograph after all and it's being touted for reasons that have nothing to do with how well it's put together. Perhaps it's because the photographer is famous and anything coming from him 'has to be good', or maybe the subject matter is topical or disturbing, outrageous or obscene and that's it's claim to fame.

On a more practical note though, can we apply this sense of rightness from one note or passage to the next, to our photographs? In some ways photographs are trickier - music is linear, notes follow in a fixed sequence over time. The eye however can wander round a photograph in any pattern it wants. It can revisit areas, stop and hover, quickly skip past other areas, loop back and generally misbehave. It can in fact abandon the image in a fraction of a second if nothing catches it's interest (just watch someone flipping through a photo magazine).

Still, the analogy is a reasonable one - the bits and pieces that make up an image have to work together. Rather like one of those soduku puzzles in which numbers have to add up every which way, the elements of the image have to work together, whether being 'read' left to right, top to bottom, diagonally, or in the opposite directions.

It's necessary to work the scene, moving round till the 'notes' fall into a workable pattern, and even harder, to walk away when despite your best efforts, they don't. There are a lot more bad photographs out there than good ones and finding the good ones requres shoe leather, a good eye, and considerable patience. With a little luck, you will strike a right good tune.