Music and Photography - beyond natural boundaries

This is a wonderful short film about a current Ansel Adams exhibition in the de Young museum in San Francisco. Make sure you don't miss the film at 4:19 where the comparison between music and photography is made. However, the whole film points to a wealth of connections between music and photography, so I highly recommend you watch it in its entirety.

Ansel Adams: The negative could be compared to the composer's score, and the print is a performance. If you have succeeded, you have a negative which has the basic information required and you can perform it. But it doesn't mean you always have to print it the same way.

Our "negative" in music is the score, which contains information so that we basically know how a piece goes. But it doesn't mean we always have to perform it the same way. The art of interpretation is most exciting when it's based on solid foundations. Also, the pre-visualization that Ansel talks about in the beginning of the film is enlightening - besides being able to "see" what your photograph should look like, it's more important to be able to feel it​.

Music is not the notes we see on the page. Landscape photography is not a reproduction of a scenery. In both cases and in both disciplines, it's about presenting an expression, a special moment in time, an essence. However, there are times when it can be hard to make that happen. Maybe we don't quite understand the score yet. Maybe we haven't spent enough time with the surrounding to really know what we want to say with our image. Maybe our approach isn't in line with what we want to express, maybe our technique still needs to widen and develop.

Studying with someone is not so that you can be in the same footsteps as your mentor, but rather to take a legacy forward in your own way. Asking questions is not invalidating a tradition, but rather a way to "push and stretch the medium further"(Misrach).

Art is always about going beyond the natural boundaries of the discipline.  

Folks in the San Francisco area should visit the exhibition! (until July 23, 2023): www.famsf.org