(I accidentally published this draft post earlier today while doing some site maintenance. Shortly afterwards a friend contacted me to say that he had composed a response… only to find that the article had disappeared when he finished writing. My apology! Even though the article is not perhaps final – for example, the title is not quite right for the content – I have resurrected it. I intend this to be part of a longer series of posts.)

There have been and are quite a few photographers who also have backgrounds in music, and in quite a few cases these individuals could have had – or actually did! – have careers in both fields. The story of Ansel Adams supposedly making a choice between being a photographer or a pianist is well-known, and there are plenty of other examples. I don’t presume to put myself in the same category as Adams, but I’m also one of these people.

When I talk with other photographers who either share this dual background or who are aware of the number of other photographers who do, the conversation sometimes turns to the question of why this is the case. What points of contact are there between the practice of music and the practice of photography? The differences seem to me to be quite obvious. Clearly one medium deals primarily with sound and the other with visual images. In addition – and I think this is even more significant – music uses the element of time in a way that photography rarely can.  Photographers almost never tell you in what order you must view photographs – though they may suggest – nor do they insist that you move on to the next image after some specified interval of time. While the photographer may intend for you to follow a particular path through some images, there is no way to ensure that you do… and you probably don’t! But the musical composer relies completely on controlling the flow of events in time. It is emphatically not OK to switch sections of a piece and so forth.

So, what is similar?

I think that there are several points of contact between music and photography. I have no illusion that I can say everything there is to say about this in one post, so let me start with a single very basic idea having to do with the relationship between technique and interpretation or expression.

Musicians (like athletes!) devote tremendous amounts of time to mastering technical skills, often to a level that cannot even be imagined by those who haven’t shared their experience of long and concentrated practice. In fact, when one begins to learn to make music (especially instrumental music – a hint about a future topic in this series) – the experience seems quite unmusical and quite unartistic. Rather than striving for a powerful affective experience – which is a primary goal of music – the beginner typically struggles with technical issues, over and over and over and over. This is one of the reasons that many beginners give up, in fact. The process is slow and repetitive and can be very frustrating. The goal is to achieve something approaching technical perfection, and every wrong note or rhythmic error needs to be addressed. Much to the frustration of those who don’t enjoy practice, it seems that some actually enjoy this process! (There is a saying that you have to learn to love to play scales.)

It is not surprising that at the early stages there is a lot of focus on the instrument. Beginners will start with a student instrument and look forward to graduating to something more sophisticated. Some even become obsessed with the instruments themselves and will aspire to get some brand or model that they think will be the very best. Hang around middle school, high school, or even some college musicians long enough and you’ll hear lots of conversations about which instrument is best, how high or fast someone can play, whether or not a performance is technically accurate and in tune, and so forth… and little talk about the fundamental emotional experience of making music.

Something similar seems to take place in photography. There are lots of reasons that one might start in photography: perhaps a family member introduced you to it, maybe you were affected by photographs you saw, you might have envied the fancy equipment, possibly you wanted to use it to share an experience that means a lot to you. But the first steps into doing photography are almost invariably technical – or at least the first steps beyond using an automatic point and shoot camera are. One must focus on a lot of technical issues: what camera and lenses to get, understanding the effects of these equipment choices, learning about the relationships between ISO and shutter speed and aperture, making decisions about depth of field, choosing the right focal length, mastering technical skills such as focusing, understanding the effects of over- and under-exposure, encountering and understanding various shooting problems and challenges, ways to think about how composition works, and much more. And eventually, thinking about all of this needs to become relatively intuitive and automatic.

It is no surprise that in this phase there is a lot of focus on equipment and technical stuff. People spend a lot of time considering what lenses and cameras to acquire, and research various brands of lenses and cameras and filters and all the rest of it – and they aspire to own the instruments, oops, I mean cameras that the best photographers use. They pore over articles and reviews and test results and debate technical minutia. Things don’t work as expected, and frustration ensues. Hang around these folks long enough and you’ll hear lots of conversations about which brand is best, which lens or tripod one should select, how fast the camera focuses or the burst mode bursts, whether or not the exposure is technically correct and noise free, and whether the resulting images seem to reflect the common wisdom about rules of composition… and very little talk about the emotional power of photographs or how that is achieved.

Wait, that sounds familiar… :-)

And in both cases, it turns out that as important as the equipment is, in the end it is pretty meaningless by itself. A person who can play through the major and minor scales without error faster than anyone else is a very impressive technician, but not necessarily making music at all. A person who knows every fact about cameras and brands and who can operate the camera adeptly is not necessarily an interesting photographer. The right machine or computer can be as expert as any human in these things, and perhaps even better.

In photography, as in music, once the technique and the equipment are in place it becomes possible to make something really interesting, expressive, and compelling. Ironically, in both cases the very thing that we must initially focus on so obsessively (in the good sense) turns out to not be the thing that actually makes music or photography interesting. Which is not to say that it is unimportant. You do have to be able to play all the right notes, and you do need to be able to operate your camera competently. But then what?

It is what one does with the equipment and technique that matters, not the equipment and the technique themselves. Don’t get me wrong. I’m certainly not saying that technique is unimportant or that equipment doesn’t matter. What I am saying is that these things are only means to another more important end. Without them that other end is likely unobtainable or will only exist in a flawed form – an expressive performance marred by distracting technical blunders. But with them, there is still work to do.

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