Photography of Music: It seems like Magic

Last Updated on January 27, 2017 by Patrick

Music is the arithmetic of sounds as optics is the geometry of light.
Claude Debussy.

When I look out the window, while it snows abundantly, I see fairy magic, something so beautiful that it’s like the sky unites with the earth through a blanket of trinkets so white that even the purest bridal veil cannot be compared to it. It’s like stars and magic, really.

I don’t really care for what happens next, when the streets of the city are buried in snow, especially when and if the ones responsible with cleaning the streets of all the so-called mess are not doing anything and barely a few things at all. I care for the phenomenon that brings me joy and awe. That is the moment I trully live. The rest of it, what happens afterwards is pure work that cleanses us of our wrongdoings. It is like we’re cleaning, or cleansing, our inner house, our Soul.

Nevertheless, when I started photographing and writing for Photography of Music, as I said in my first chapter, I didn’t know what I would find but now I know. I was looking for beauty. I was looking for harmony, rhythm, beauty and light. I was looking for order, but also for chaos, in which there is beauty both in the details as well as in the mere suggested lines and forces that make and shape what comes next before the opened eyes.

So, photography to me has a way of singing, has music within its very elements of composition, withing its very spirit. I don’t know how, but visual arts are really almost the same, if not the same, as musical arts. Whether it is sound that makes the work of art or colour, or tones, it does not matter. All vibrate in the same way: in harmony.

Now I see no difference whatsoever between music and photography, or painting, even sculpture. I see they’re all the same emanation of an intelligent creative force. I make and I don’t make my photographs, both in the same time. They’re sort of making themselves but mostly they’re not. It’s a cooperation, a collaboration between little me and the Greater Creator who is outside of me, in one way, but in another, is still connected to me within.

I would say the cliched “we are all connected” and I would be right, even if this expression is now very popular. It could draw us in to an unconscious collective, so fascinating for the masses, if we are not careful. Should we question ourselves all the time? Should we ask ourselves in what state we are, inwardly and outwardly? I say yes, and it is the basis of all freedom and creativity.

I would like now to show you another quote I came across recently:

There is geometry in the humming of the strings, there is music in the spacing of the spheres.
Pythagoras.

That’s a mathematician who said it. We all know Pythagoras, right? But above this, he was also a wise man, an initiate of some sort in hermetic arts. But what are these? Hermetic arts are part of arts but transcendental and secretive, speaking symbolically for the masses and loud an clear for those who know their symbols and all.

But did you know that there is geometry in sound also? Those musical or melodic sounds have a sort of symmetry or coherence that are also found in geometrical shapes we all recognize.

It is so wonderful to see shapes aligning and dancing visually, even though the image is static, though dynamic due to its composition. I think still photography, though a pleonasm to say it, trains our intuition and imagination making us think freely giving it motion. It makes us imagine what could be or what the photographic artist wanted to say. This latter is nowadays called critique. But everyone is entitled to have an opinion, right?

Here’s another one:

There’s a theory that says that life is based on a competition and the struggle and the fight for survival, and it’s interesting because when you look at the fractal character of evolution, it’s totally different. It’s based on cooperation among the elements in the geometry and not competition.
Bruce Lipton.

This is a more modern approach to the everyday biological reality. Even though Dr. Lipton is a biologist he brought us great truths of Nature which are fundamental facts of how the Universe works and also our planet with its biosphere. And to think about it, we are not separate from Nature, we are part of it just like the cells are a part of our organism. We comprise Nature as well as the other living beings we share this planet with.

Thousands of years ago magic and science was one and the same, the great sages of the north used to say. But to think about it, is photography a work of magic? I mean we manipulate light and energy and nature photography, nowadays, is more interpretive than representing reality. It is not that what we see in such a photograph never happened, it did, only so in a quantum field of personal imaginative experiences based on the materials Nature brings us.

It is not wrong to darken a photographic work, only to make it an interpretation of how it felt when experienced. It is actually right to do so because the separation of the subject matter with their compositional elements by means of a darkened negative space, speaking in photographical, artistical terms, refines even more the work of art per se and overall, and keeps the viewer attentive to the message of the work, focused and contemplative in awe and joy. In addition, the language used in the photograph is refined as well, its expression and everything. It is actually something sublime to contemplate.

When I started this journey in photography and music I did not know, nor expected, to find Nature quite the opposite I used to know Her. I spoke before of the television documentaries concerning Nature and all, with animals and plants, and natural habitats etc., and I said that they have it all wrong. It is quite opposite, as Dr. Lipton put it, and one could wonder why, in the harshest of the environments, in the desert or in the arctic regions, or even in the greatest depths of the oceans, does life thrive, given the fact (as they say it.. you know.. the “experts”) that those places are hostile to life on earth? They can never answer due to their arrogance. Once they put themselves on the path of modesty and humility and walk it, all gates of Nature will open for them and they will understand why.

Science and even religion, nowadays, have it all the opposite as it really is. Now we’re beginning to see and understand how it actually is and this is ground breaking, nonetheless, despite the fact that we are very late, but not sorry.

Save

Save

Save

Save

Save

Save