Musicians

Another passion of mine has always been music, listening to it and performing. Brought up with a Dad who works in the music industry and owns over 3,000 CD's and LP's I have always been interested in watching and listening to performers and therefore I felt as we get to write our own brief for our Negotiated Practice project I would combine my two interests, music and photography, the only hard part was coming up with a good idea to fuse the two. My brain wave came when I read an interview with Phil Collins who was discussing a particular advert I am sure you all know, where a man in a gorilla costume drums one of his well known songs to advertise Cadbury's chocolate (no I don't get the link between chocolate and a man in a Gorilla costume drumming either) but back to my point. Phil Collins states that because Cadburys hires an actor to learn and drum the part instead of an experienced musician, he gets the song exactly right. This is because he did not know how to play the drums and merely learnt what he was given, whereas a professional drummer would have his own technique and style that he would put to the song. This gave me the idea of documenting musicians as they play. Capturing their attitude to what they are playing. The relationship between a musician and their instrument, their music. I know that when I perform I get absorbed in what I am playing and this raw emotion of someone doing what they love and getting into it is what I wanted to capture.

So I sent an email out to everyone at University calling for all musicians and got a good response. My first shoot I had about 10 people, a few guitarists, a couple of singers, a flutist, clarinet player, cellist and even a ukulele. I got them into the studio, sat them down and told them to play anything they were comfortable with and just started snapping. I wanted to focus on the facial features as this is where the main emotion comes from so I cropped right in. I am really pleased with the results of my first shoot and think the images look great. I particularly like the head shots where you can't see the instrument or what thy are doing as it makes the images all the more interesting.

Anyway, I shall let you have a look and determine whether you like the idea and the photographs for yourself, but for the moment I am very pleased with the final result. The first 7 are of people playing or singing with instruments that you can't see due to the crop whereas the last three you can clearly see what they are doing, which as I stated earlier I don't think are as successful though they are still nice shots! Enjoy!

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