Sound and photography
I attended a very interesting interdisciplinary lecture yesterday on the combination of sound and photography. Peter Cusack who teaches the BA Sound course at LCC and Paul Lowe, my course teacher, each presented work in this context.
Peter presented a series of soundscapes he recorded in Chernobyl and which forms part of a larger body of work on “sounds from dangerous places”. The soundscapes are meant to represent sonic ways of what ecological disaster has done to a specific region. The samples included sounds from the exclusion zone, Geiger/radiometer readings and the sound of someone walking over books splattered across a former school floor.
Paul presented work he has done for Christian Aid, in Israel and an impressive series of portraits of grieving women from Bosnia; each presented as a slideshow and combined with sound (voice over, ambient sound and in the latter case with music from Steve Reich and a Bosnian sound artist).
Obviously a discussion followed the presentation on the combination of sound and photography. While acknowledging that it might become a commercial necessity to combine visual and acoustic elements (most newspapers have now a form of video clips on their websites and the direction is clearly towards this kind of combination), I have my reservations.
Doesn’t the combination and synthesis of sound and visual elements distract from the underlying elements? Either you focus on the photographs or the sound that accompanies it? And more importantly, haven’t “photo artists” (and sound artists for that matter) for years and years attempted to distil moments, emotions, meaning into one frame, which is so carefully composed in order for it be read in isolation? Aren’t we shooting hundreds or thousands of frames just for one short story and embark on a sometimes cumbersome, excruciating and exhausting editing process afterwards to get to the series of a few images that tell the whole story? Are we tempted to be less vigorous in composing and choosing our shots because we know we have sound and other sensory elements that will accompany it and explain what we have sloppily left out in our photographs?
Peter presented a series of soundscapes he recorded in Chernobyl and which forms part of a larger body of work on “sounds from dangerous places”. The soundscapes are meant to represent sonic ways of what ecological disaster has done to a specific region. The samples included sounds from the exclusion zone, Geiger/radiometer readings and the sound of someone walking over books splattered across a former school floor.
Paul presented work he has done for Christian Aid, in Israel and an impressive series of portraits of grieving women from Bosnia; each presented as a slideshow and combined with sound (voice over, ambient sound and in the latter case with music from Steve Reich and a Bosnian sound artist).
Obviously a discussion followed the presentation on the combination of sound and photography. While acknowledging that it might become a commercial necessity to combine visual and acoustic elements (most newspapers have now a form of video clips on their websites and the direction is clearly towards this kind of combination), I have my reservations.
Doesn’t the combination and synthesis of sound and visual elements distract from the underlying elements? Either you focus on the photographs or the sound that accompanies it? And more importantly, haven’t “photo artists” (and sound artists for that matter) for years and years attempted to distil moments, emotions, meaning into one frame, which is so carefully composed in order for it be read in isolation? Aren’t we shooting hundreds or thousands of frames just for one short story and embark on a sometimes cumbersome, excruciating and exhausting editing process afterwards to get to the series of a few images that tell the whole story? Are we tempted to be less vigorous in composing and choosing our shots because we know we have sound and other sensory elements that will accompany it and explain what we have sloppily left out in our photographs?
posted by rupert beagle at 1:38 pm
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