My new exhibit, “Music is…: A photographic celebration of the UW-Madison School of Music,” is now on display at the Lowell Center, 610 Langdon Street, Madison, WI, from March 1 – April 30, 2015.
Between April 2013 and the summer of 2014 I volunteered my time taking photographs of a wide variety of classes, rehearsals, and concerts for the UW-Madison School of Music. The purpose of this project was to update their photo library with images that could be used to rebuild the school’s website. The new website went online in the summer of 2014. You can see it at http://www.music.wisc.edu/.
During that time I took approximately 7000 photographs of students and faculty in an amazing variety of bands, orchestras, and choral groups. If you’re a photographer you undoubtedly realize that many of these photographs are rejects. Students are moving, have closed their eyes, are not quite in focus, or have strange looks on their faces. Some of the rejects are photos that I thought were interesting only to find later that they didn’t really appeal to me after all. Some are early shots of an idea that shifted and changed as I worked it until I got the composition that I wanted. It’s always a joy to distill off the keepers and find those that capture the feeling of a scene, or the intensity of a student musician at work, or an image that just makes you want to stop and study it.
My artist’s statement for this exhibit starts out as follows:
I’m not a musician. Most people aren’t. And yet music seems to weave itself around and through all of our lives. It taps into our hearts, lends a voice to our emotions, and carves indelible images into our memories. A tune may lift our spirits or bring tears to our eyes. The right score helps to carry us through a favorite film. One chord might unlock melodies and verses that were thought to be long forgotten.
It’s an interesting challenge to use a visual medium to try to capture the essence of an aural experience. I don’t think I’ve been able to do that yet. But, I think that the photos in this exhibit will give you a taste of what music is for these musicians.
To give you a taste for what’s on display, here are few from the project that would have been included had there been room for more photos. The photos from the exhibit will be added to this post at a later date.
I’ve written about photographing musicians before. If you’re interested, please see Time to face the music and The joy of music.
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3/26/15 Update: All of the images from this exhibit can now be viewed in the book, “Music is…” Click here to preview the entire book.