This is definitely not landscape photography.

One of the things on my agenda when we spent a week in New York City last month was photographing “Così fan tutte: Some Assembly Required,” an unusual event based on Mozart’s opera. Over the course of four evenings at the Gershwin Hotel in Manhattan, a group of singers and instrumentalists and others revealed much that might otherwise not be apparent the opera by “assembling” a portion of the opera each night. The outline of the event was that each evening would begin with an informal rehearsal of a section of the opera, interspersed with commentary from participants, and then conclude with a straight-through reading of the section that had been rehearsed. Beyond that, many of those participating also “took it online” during the event, tweeting and blogging as it took place. (My wife played principal oboe in the orchestra, and I have to tell you it was very strange to get text messages from her during the “show!”)

Photographing the event presented some interesting opportunities along with some challenges. The challenges were mostly what you might expect – concert venues, especially during a “rehearsal” are often not lit with photography in mind, and the space in the Gershwin Hotel where this took place was a virtual nightmare of photographic problems. The walls are bright red! The lighting was very low. There were columns in the middle of the orchestra. All in a day’s work, right? (I mostly shot natural light, and was very glad to have a 135mm f/2 lens and a Canon 5D2 which produces quite decent images at ISO 3200.) The opportunities, however, were worth the challenges. For one, unlike an actual performance at which the noise of a camera is simply unacceptable and, in addition, one needs to be virtually invisible, because this was an informal event I was not only able to shoot as the performance took place, but I was also able to wander around more or less at will. And while performers can often be quite skittish about being photographed during a performance – it creates an unwelcome distraction for them – these performers were very relaxed about it and even seemed to want to be photographed.

I exposed hundreds of frames during the two nights I was there, and I’m only now finding the time to sort through them. I will almost certainly not post all of the photographs here individually, as I would do with a lot of my other work, but (below the “jump”) I will collect many of them in this post. Note that this work is ongoing – I’m starting with an initial set of ten photographs, but others will be added as I update this post later. Continue reading Photographs from “Così fan tutte: Some Assembly Required” →