Tangible Sound

My beginnings in photography intersected with my first encounters with creative improvised music in the late 70s; my camera a passport to the edge of the stage where the music reverberated in my bones, connecting me to an ancient energy that comes from a collective power stronger than itself.  The music and its African American creators revealed a creative liberation theology; a vow to transform a legacy of tyranny and injustice into freedom and exultation.  I was drawn to that bold truth telling, and sought it out at every opportunity in the sometimes gritty sacred spaces where it thrives.

I photographed in storefront jazz churches, small clubs and downtown lofts. The dimly lit spaces informed my practice of allowing available light to govern how I visualized sound.  I photographed the music from the outside; focusing on moments when body language expressed a musician’s arrival to that higher ground, or the quiet eloquence of the moments in between.   Incontrovertibly drawn to music at the periphery of popular consciousness, I sought to make it more visible by invoking the dignity and command of its protagonists.

I was deeply inspired by the experience of collective creativity, which became the motivating factor in my larger life. It grounded the collaborative work I performed over the past 20 years in organizing, curating and presenting musicians performing in Chicago and internationally. I created places for community to gather, where congregants came together for spiritual union and reunion. I created innumerable opportunities for new work to be conceived and performed, and I photographed it all, rendering moments of transformation into textures of color and spectrums of light.

It has been a lifelong inquiry for me to construe a visual equivalent of the music and its makers. I was welcomed into a creative and spiritual community whose rich African American culture felt like home to me, and whose fearless investigations challenged my assumptions about what is possible.

When I embraced digital photography in the early 2000s I began to visualize music from the inside. I freed myself from boundaries of convention, turning still images into bold, sweeping eruptions of light and sound by moving the camera and my body with the music as I photographed at slow shutter speeds; often recreating the same chromatic terrain musicians have reported to me that they see in their minds when they play.  I feel I’m in visual conversations with musicians, chronicling our improvisational dialog with the method I have mastered to make sound visually tangible. 

To be a conduit for people to experience beauty in a moment when the urgency of the times speaks more loudly for social change, is to say that beauty still matters. What motivates my practice is my belief that making space for beauty in our disparate lives nurtures a faith in our shared humanity, and a conviction in the power of our common cause.