Music and Photography: How One Art Inspires the Other
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Loading... - Nke Assomo
- 19 Aug 2022
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Of all the arts available to mankind, my heart belongs to music. Perhaps it’s a sentiment that doesn’t serve my self-interest much, as my only achievements in the arts have come through photography. The fact that my creativity has come by way of visuals has not been from lack of attempts in the audio world. Ten years of playing the piano as a child has given me the gift of being able to play one verse from Beethoven’s 5th at a cocktail party.
In many ways I believe that fate had determined that I shouldn’t have taken guitar lessons, and instead that I should be practicing composition of the visual order through a viewfinder. It is for this reason that when I had the opportunity to create a photo series around musicians, I truly had the time of my life on set. I was vicariously living through them as we went through different motions of playing guitar and jamming out. While they were both models, they are also active musicians, so the finger placements and passion shown in the imagery is real. We were blasting everything in the studio from AC/DC to Disturbed and Fall Out Boy to Pantera. It was as if the music that was in my mind during a shoot was being broadcast.
It wasn’t untill we wrapped for lunch and I sat with the musicians and talked about what drove them that I found the correlations between photography and music are more similar than I thought. It wasn’t necessarily performance or being seen that mattered to them, but rather the need to have an expression, just like I have felt about photography. In many ways a career in art starts as one that is extraordinarily extrospective, but as one progresses through it becomes introspective, yet on public display.
Normally on a photo shoot I only take a few minutes off for lunch, as I don’t really like to eat during a shoot for fear that it’ll slow me down behind the camera. Thankfully I have an assistant who always carries Snickers so that I don’t get hangry. However, on this shoot, things were a bit different as the conversations I had with the models made me think even harder into how I could express what they had just talked about with my camera. At the end of a shoot of jamming and rocking with crazy intensity, I asked the male model if he would stay behind for one shot as I wanted to show visually how much his guitar meant to him. It wasn’t staged or forced, but natural, and in many ways it was touching because I could see in a single image that music was just as necessary to him as breathing. Read More...
