Whether it's as simple as Twinkle, Twinkle Little Star or as sassy and bold as Savage Remix, lyrics move us. They provide memories of meaningful moments. This week's assignment is "Inspired By Music" or "Favorite Song Lyric."
Photography and music have a lot in common. Both have to intrigue the viewer/listener with something new and interesting so that they keep on looking or listening. Yet on the other side they still have to appeal to the audience's expectancy of beauty, harmony and patterns.
Photography and music also both give the audience the space to interpret the artwork with their own life experiences.
You can choose to literally recreate the lyrics into visual form or choose to shoot a photo that represents the emotions you feel when you hear the words of the song. This week's assignment is very much a "story" assignment, in that, ideally your photo should be portraying some form of story, message, or emotion inspired by music.
Check out these websites for inspiration:
Ansel Adams & His Piano Ambitions
Ansel Easton Adams (February 20, 1902 – April 22, 1984) was an American photographer and environmentalist. His black-and-white landscape photographs of the American West, especially Yosemite National Park, have been widely reproduced on calendars, posters, books, and the internet. The way he embraces the light makes his pictures almost look like paintings. They are carefully arranged and have a very unique atmosphere to them.
But did YOU know that instead of becoming a photographer, he was more focused on his musical career?
He was a very ambitious and successful piano player and attributes most of his success in the photography world also to his musical education. In music, you hit the right note, or you don’t. And if you don’t hit the right note, then this is an obvious mistake.
With the same precision, he also tackled photography. If something was off in his pictures, it was a simple failure and he wouldn’t publish them. Working very hard, to get that one picture that isn’t a failure, has made him one of the best photographers of the 20th century.
He also enjoyed listening to music while photographing. To him, it opened up a whole new world and it made him see shapes and other structures, that he wouldn’t see without the music.
Musicians that wrote songs inspired by a photograph:
Photo: Patti Smith by Robert Mapplethorpe - Music: Suddenly I See by KT Tunstall
KT Tunstall’s song was a response to Robert Mapplethorpe’s most famous portrait of Patti Smith. Sean Kelly, who represents Mapplethorpe’s work in New York, writes that the photograph, which appeared on the cover of Smith’s first album, “Horses,” “almost singlehandedly reinvented the image of the art-rock musician as icon of cool for a new generation of listeners and viewers.”
Photo: Alfried Krupp, Industrialist by Howard Greenberg & Child with Toy Hand Grenade by Diane Arbus- Music: Crosby, Stills, Nash & Young - Teach Your Children
Crosby, Stills, Nash & Young’s was inspired by Arnold Newman’s portrait of Alfred Krupp and Diane Arbus’s Child with Toy Hand Grenade” Graham Nash writes that seeing the two photographs exhibited side by side “spoke to me about the process of teaching and learning from our children. If we didn’t teach our children a better way of dealing with fellow human beings, then humanity might be doomed. The song was already being formed in my mind. I had bits and pieces, and this experience of the placement of these two images next to each other solidified my ideas, and the song was brought to life.”
Photo: Animal Locomotion, Plate 626 by Eadward Muybridge - Music: Philip Glass Chamber Opera
“Muybridge’s work is focused on repetition and systems, and is obsessed with the nature of time and the human body, so it’s no surprise that Philip Glass responded directly to his work.” Glass was also fascinated by Muybridge’s personal history: in 1874, the photographer shot and killed his wife’s lover, in California, but a jury refused to convict him. Muybridge continued his work for two more decades.
Photo: The Lynching of Thomas Shipp and Abram Smith by Lawrence Beitler, August 7, 1930 - Music: Strange Fruit by Bille Holiday
Abel Meeropol wrote Billie Holiday's song after seeing Beitler’s iconic photograph of the lynching of Thomas Shipp and Abram Smith. Meeropol first wrote a poem called “Bitter Fruit,” which he then set to music. Holiday’s first performance of the song was at Café Society, one of the first integrated night clubs in New York, in 1939. Sixty years later, Time called “Strange Fruit” “the song of the century.”
Photo: Walker Evans, “Alabama Tenant Farmer Wife” (1936) - Music: The Tender Land Opera by Aaron Coland
Aaron Copland wrote his opera "The Tender Land" after seeing Walker Evans’s work in “Let Us Now Praise Famous Men.” Jeff Rosenheim, the curator in charge of the Metropolitan Museum’s photograph department, says that the book asks the reader “to look straight at the wretchedness of life. The results are shocking, and the readers feel complicit in the misery, as well as in the author’s intellectual and physical trespass.”
Photo: Owen Beattie, “John Torrington” (1984) - Music: The Frozen Man by James Taylor
James Taylor’s "The Frozen Man” was inspired by the anthropologist Owen Beattie’s photograph of the frozen corpse of the nineteenth-century explorer John Torrington. John Geiger, Beattie’s co-author on “Frozen in Time: The Fate of the Franklin Expedition,” writes, “It is a rare thing to be able to look into the eyes of someone who has been dead for more than a century, and to have him look right back at you.” Taylor’s song, Geiger continues, is “a beautiful, haunting ode to something dead that is alive again in our world.”
Photo: Phil Toledano “The Woods” (2008) Music: Gone to Sleep, by Moby
Moby wrote Gone to Sleep after seeing Phil Toledano’s photograph “The Woods.” “This image was made during a period when I was obsessed with using cotton wool for clouds and explosions,” Toledano writes. “It’s all done in camera, with bits of string, clumps of cotton wool, and a model who was slightly peeved at having his face obscured.” Toledano says that he likes the song, but would have preferred to actively collaborate on it. “What can I say? I’m an overachiever.”
Photo: Untitled No. 36 by Cindy Sherman - Music: Evidence by Jimmy Eat World
Hannah Starkey and Cindy Sherman’s photographs inspired Jimmy Eat World’s album Invented.” Jim Adkins, the lead singer and guitarist, came up with the track “Evidence” after seeing “Untitled Film Still No. 36.” Adkins writes, “The story I found in the photograph goes like this: a couple moves in together too quickly. Got a deal on a rent-controlled studio apartment in the pink-cloud phase of dating. Eh, why not? Their differences played out pretty quickly.… In an argument about who should leave, she decides to divide the bed and some of the room with an extra bed sheet.”
Examples Of How Artists and Musicians Inspire Each Other
Photographer: Richard Avedon - Musician: Bob Dylan
This portrait of Bob Dylan was taken by photographer, Richard Avedon.
Folk-rock singer-songwriter Bob Dylan signed his first recording contract in 1961, and he emerged as one of the most original and influential voices in American popular music. Dylan has continued to tour and release new studio albums, including Together Through Life (2009), Tempest (2012), Shadows in the Night (2015) and Fallen Angels (2016). The legendary singer-songwriter has received Grammy, Academy and Golden Globe awards, as well as the Presidential Medal of Freedom and the Nobel Prize for Literature.
American photographer Richard Avedon (who we discussed in the High Key assignment) was best known for his work in the fashion world, for his minimalist portraits, ad his photo series "In the American West." He worked first as a photographer for the Merchant Marines, taking identification photos. He then moved to fashion, shooting for Harper's Bazaar and Vogue, demanding that his models convey emotion and movement, a departure from the norm of motionless fashion photography.
Photographer: David Burnett - Musician: Bob Marley
Time magazine photographer, David Burnett, said this after photographing Bob Marly. “Marley seemed really interesting, very warm and welcoming. He seemed to be a man who at a very young age understood what life is about in ways that I even in my far advanced years didn’t feel I had that kind of wisdom. I really thought I was sitting with somebody who really had figured things out, not just another rock n roll musician. He was someone who understood that his message, the message in his music, was really one that people would listen to. When we left he said in a rather humble way: ‘My music will live forever’."
Bob Marley - In Jamaica, the ravages of poverty and racism were not lost upon the youth movement there. The birth of reggae music addressed issues of all kinds, but it can be argued that Bob Marley had perhaps the most impact on a generation there, with songs addressing his views on nuclear proliferation, and slavery, in his famous "Redemption Song", recorded shortly before his premature death shortly afterward. The song urges listeners to "Emancipate yourself from mental slavery," because "none but ourselves can free our minds."
Photographer: Daria Addabbo - Musician: Bruce Springsteen
Italian born photographer, Daria Addabbo, used the music and lyrics of Bruce Springsteen to create a photo series that commented on middle and working class America. “The aim was to picture his songs and the contemporary United States through them: the working-class condition, the middle-class crisis, the American Dream, broken but still alive,” Addabbo told In Sight. “The lyrics are a true manifesto of the American suburbs, with its characters ready to burn and run away with their dreams.” - Daria Addabbo
Artist: Arthur Jafa - Musician: Kanye West
Arthur Jafa is a film director, cinematographer, and visual artist who has worked with musicians and directors, including Stanley Kubrick, Spike Lee, Solange Knowles and Jay-Z.
Using the music and lyrics of Kanye West's song, Ultralight Beam, Jafa uses original images and found imagery from concerts, marches, music videos, news reports, police cameras, YouTube, and other sources to "make black cinema with the power, beauty, and alienation of black music." - Arthur Jafa
The images below are stills from the seven minute long video installation, Love Is The Message, The Message is Death (Video Installation) by Arthur Jafa - Music by Kanye West
A list of songs in which photography is one of the main subjects.
- Aperture – Sleeping at Last
- Are You Happy Now? – Richard Shindell, from the album Courier, 2002
- Birth of Serpents – The Mountain Goats
- Camera – R.E.M.
- Camera – The Editors
- Camera Phone – The Game
- Cameras – Matt and Kim
- Camera-Shy – The Lucksmiths
- Centerfold – J. Geils Band, 1981
- The Camera Eye – Rush
- The Cameraeye – Billy Corgan, from the album The Future Embrace, 2005
- Click Click Click - New Kids on the Block, 2008
- Click, click, click, click – Bishop Allen
- Developments - Hands Like Houses
- Distant Camera – Neil Young
- Du hast den Farbfilm vergessen (You Forgot The Color Film) – Nina Hagen
- Electric Eye – Judas Priest
- Every Picture Tells a Story – Rod Stewart, 1971
- F-stop Blues – Jack Johnson, from the album Brushfire Fairytales, 2001
- Flashbulb Eyes – Arcade Fire, 2013
- Fountain of Sorrow - Jackson Browne, 1974
- Freeze Frame – J. Geils Band, 1981
- Gentlemen Take Polaroids – Japan, 1980
- Girls on Film – Duran Duran, 1981
- Hey Ya! – Outkast (Shake it like a Polaroid picture)
- Ich Clack Dich - Le Le, 2008 (NL)
- I'll Wait – Van Halen, 1984
- I Turn My Camera On – Spoon
- Inaudible Melodies – Jack Johnson, from the album Brushfire Fairytales, 2001
- Into the Lens – Yes, 1980
- Itchin' on a Photograph – Grouplove, 2011
- Kamera – Wilco, from Yankee Hotel Foxtrot, 2002
- Kevin Carter – Manic Street Preachers
- Kodachrome – Paul Simon
- Kodak Moments - Askil Holm, from the album Harmony Hotel, 2007
- Life thru a Lens – Robbie Williams, 1997
- My Camera Never Lies – Bucks Fizz
- Panama – Sailor
- Paparazzi – Lady Gaga
- Peg – Steely Dan
- People Take Pictures of Each Other – The Kinks from the album The Kinks are the Village Green Preservation Society, 1968
- Perfect Photo – Dala
- Photo – Ryan Cabrera
- Photo Jenny – Belle and Sebastian, from the album Push Barman to Open Old Wounds, 2005
- Photobooth – Death Cab for Cutie
- Photobooth – Friendly Fires
- Photograph – Def Leppard, 1983
- Photograph – Diane Birch
- Photograph – Jamie Cullum
- Photograph – Nickelback
- Photograph – Ed Sheeran
- Photograph – Ringo Starr
- Photograph – Weezer
- Photograph – The Verve Pipe
- Photographs – Rihanna
- Photographic – Depeche Mode
- Picture – Kid Rock & Sheryl Crow
- Picture Book – The Kinks from the album The Kinks are the Village Green Preservation Society, 1968
- A Picture of Me (Without You) – Lorrie Morgan
- Picture Perfect – Every Avenue
- Picture This – Blondie, 1978
- Picture This - Kero Kero Bonito, 2015
- Picture to Burn – Taylor Swift
- Pictures of Home – Deep Purple
- Pictures of Lily – The Who
- Pictures of You – The Last Goodnight
- Pictures of You – The Cure
- Picture of You – Boyzone
- Picture of You – WAX
- Selfie – The Chainsmokers
- Send a Picture of Mother – Johnny Cash
- Souvenir de Chine — Jean-Michel Jarre
- Sure Shot – Beastie Boys from the album Ill Communication, 1994
- Take a Picture – Filter
- Take Another Picture – Quarterflash
- Telephoto Lens – The Bongos
- The Picture – Loudon Wainwright III
- The Girl in the Picture - Kate Ceberano and Wendy Matthews
- This Is not a Photograph – Mission of Burma
- Turning Japanese – The Vapors
- Wishing (If I Had a Photograph of You) – A Flock of Seagulls
- Wouldn't It be a Lovely Photograph - Ray Lamontagne
Assignment:
- Create 3 photographs inspired by MUSIC. (20 images per final image=60 photos on CS at minimum)
- You can choose to literally recreate the lyrics into visual form OR choose to shoot a photo that represents the emotions you feel when you hear the words of the song.
- This week's assignment is very much a "story" assignment, in that, ideally your photo should be portraying some form of story, message, or emotion inspired by music.
- Please title your piece using the song and musician.
- Since you are only submitting 3 images, make sure they are top notch quality in composition, technical skill and conceptual quality.
- Listen to some of your favorite music for inspiration and then consider listening to some music that you wouldn't normally list to. Ask you friends, parents, grandparents, neighbors to share some of their favorite music.
- Put your pictures & Contact Sheets on Flickr in an album called "Inspired by Music"
- If you really get inspired, feel free to do more than one for EXTRA CREDIT!