Symphony

Music has been integral to my entire creative life. First as a dancer, then a filmmaker, and now a writer and a photographic artist. Returning to photography after an absence of thirty years in 2020, my photographic practice contained several bodies of work, that didn’t seem to speak to each other. They felt disparate, even though I could see I was using similar visual motifs throughput. I began to think about music––in particular, symphonies. A symphony is a musical narrative composed of either three or four musically distinct movements, that magically come together to create a unified aesthetic and emotional experience for the listener. They are a mastery of structure and orchestration, a command of tone, color and harmony. The origin of the word symphony derives from the word “cohesion.” I decided to use the tools of the musician to discover the moments of convergence in my own photographs, no matter how different they initially appeared. By grouping together three or four different images to make a single image, I discovered moments of harmony in my practice; the mournful sound of a cello depicted by light in one photograph repeated through a pattern of light in another, a shared narrative, reoccurring motifs throughout, expressed with color, line, pattern, form and light.