I got into instant photography (see my instagram) about two years ago and bought a Fuji Instax camera on a whim. I hadn't really been into photography before then and went into it without big expectations, was just drawn to the dreamy, faded colors of instant photography. It's been an interesting learning experience, starting out by just naively messing around, seeing what works and what doesn’t, and slowly finding out more about the process and the art over time.
Along the way, I’ve found that I generally prefer more abstract, non-representative images. Instant photography is especially suited for abstract photography, since the photos, once ejected, are easy to manipulate while developing - to achieve similar manipulations with regular film photography, you’d need a dedicated dark room. Forcefully rubbing, pushing, scratching or cutting the photo's back will distort the delicate and complex color-development process, giving way to strange and unpredictable color distortions and patterns. These techniques even work on pictures of blank surfaces, producing images that look more like paintings than photographs.
I've been trying out all kinds of objects for manipulation purposes. Cheese graters, for example, produce strange, 3D-like metallic textures (see the image below this paragraph). There are other, more sophisticated forms of manipulation too, involving factors like temperature and humidity. Some even inject different chemicals into the developing picture. There's a whole little community dedicated to this kind of instant photography bathtub alchemy. Rhiannon Adam details many of these techniques in her book Polaroid: The Missing Manual.
Now, what does all this have to do with music? Well, I've also been making electronic music for about eight years now and have been thinking about the relation between the two processes and artforms. Getting into photography has been an interesting contrast to electronic music making. By this point, I'd consider myself fairly knowledgeable and technically adept when it comes to music production. But in photography, I'm a hopelessly naive novice. Since I’m sticking to my very rudimentary Instax camera (you can't even turn off the auto-flash! ) for the time being, I am blissfully ignorant of the kind of tech talk you see in online photography communities. It takes me back to my very early days of messing around with Ableton Live, not really knowing what anything is or does; just twiddling knobs and buttons in a state of childlike wonder. While I think there’s a danger in romanticizing the beginner's naivety too much, there's certainly something to it, a special kind of freedom.
So far, my impression has been that, in photography, technical skill poses less of a hurdle to aesthetically pleasing results than it does in music production. Not that there is no technical skill in photography, of course - I'd suck as a wedding or fashion photographer - but when disregarding professional guidelines and shooting purely for pleasure, it is possible to capture interesting and pleasing images through imagination and trial and error. Meanwhile in music production - which centers on construction, rather than capture - there are technical hurdles every step of the way. Just being able to craft a simple, yet satisfying kickdrum takes years of experience. Electronic (dance) music is usually functionalist and formalist music, which imposes strong technical standards. I don't necessarily dislike this - In fact, I think there's something honest and grounded to the workmanlike nature of the process, especially when considering the borderline scams the craft-less, free-for-all contemporary art world enables.
Still, there’s something freeing to the unpredictable process of instant photography manipulation. You point the camera, press the shutter, mess around and wait to see what kind of image emerges. Of course, often, if not most of the time, the results are unappealing. But occasionally, the stars align and a captivating image appears. Much of the skill in this process seems to lie in selection, being able to pick out the worthwhile images from a pile of mediocre ones. There’s a certain passivity to the process.
In comparison, making electronic music, especially in a contemporary DAW environment, is a much more involved affair. Every step of the way, there are dozens, hundreds, maybe even thousands of potential parameters waiting to be tweaked. Everything can be infinitely edited, recalled and revised. Unless you force yourself to give up decisions, nothing will ever get finished, because there’s always more tweaking to be done. In online production communities, it isn’t uncommon to come across people who get so lost in the process that they end up working on simple dance music tracks for months, maybe even years - a far cry from the point-and-click capture of instant photography. If its challenge lies in making the most of its technical constraints and unpredictability, contemporary music production faces the opposite challenge of needing to find ways to surrender control.
Of course, these differences partly stem from the fact that I’m comparing analog photography to computer-based music making. But there is also a deeper, more fundamental difference between the two that lies in their temporal dimension. Any playing or recording of sound always takes place across a duration, while photography happens in the instant, it captures and freezes a moment as static eternity. What I find curious here: Isn’t the latter, photographic time, close to the ideal that so many electronic (dance) music producers aspire to? We are always striving to reduce our tracks down to that single perfect loop; a structure without arrangement or development that could just go on forever as it is, a little world in itself. We dream of absolute, frozen presence; the instant photographic time of God (according to classic medieval theology, time in heaven does not progress, but is composed of a single instant).
Speaking of capture, it is worth reflecting on the relationship between camera and microphone. While the microphone is not necessarily one of electronic music's primary tools, it offers something no synthesizer can - a photo(sono)-graphic capture of a piece of world. Both the camera and the microphone are world-capturing devices, who’s machinic senses exceed ordinary human perception. They capture a scene fully and objectively, without the subjective hierarchization and shifting attention patterns inherent to human perception. They are, to use a term from Francois Laruelle, "hyperphenomenological", capture little abnormalities and ghostly traces that we might not even know where they came from - the "infra-world" of perception.
To me, this is one of the most fascinating aspects of the photographic process: It can capture something that does not appear to belong to our ordinary world of perception. Get the camera very close or very far away and things blur and distort, lose their known shapes, become something different and alien. There are similar phenomena in music when, for example, heavily boosting residual regions of a sounds’ spectrum. It can reveal entirely new sonic characteristics of itself when you bring faint, barely audible harmonics and resonances up to audible levels. Employing such "lenses" and different degrees of zoom and depth, the micro becomes macro and vice versa - we are drawn into the vast, hissing depths of perception. One musical artist that excels at the skillful manipulation of "photographic" micro-perceptions is Éliane Radigue. In her slow, careful and fragile sound-arrangements, shifting resonances and harmonic partials create lense-like effects that shine light on subtle, eerie phenomena that would otherwise not be audible, almost sound as if they do not really belong to the sonic picture.
Roland Barthes, in what might be photography's most famous philosophical text, speaks of what he calls the punctum, a certain element within a picture that doesn't quite seem to fit, stands out from the rest and both disturbs and constitutes the photographic arrangement. Is Éliane Radigue's electronic music not full of what we could call a "sonic punctum"? Here, she is undoubtedly aided by her particular choice of instruments - the nonlinear grain and texture of analog magnetic tape and the vibrant aliveness of the famous ARP 2500 analog modular system. One of the ironies of digital audio is that - after giving us the clarity and fidelity that so many longed for in the analog age - clarity has come to haunt us. Today, even glitzy pop producers like Max Martin have been known to layer white noise under their tracks.
When making electronic music on the computer, much of what I do is intentionally adding distortion, blur and grain. I suppose the photographic equivalent would be adding filters and the like in Photoshop. Interesting (sonic) images demand techniques that are often counter intuitive. For example, "good engineering" would demand that sounds are clearly separated within the frequency spectrum. But interesting perceptual phenomena can appear when sounds overlap ("masking") and perceptually meld together, giving birth to new, emergent hybrid-sounds.
When something is in a state of not being clearly perceptible, we commonly say that it is grainy. Grain is a noisy surplus that interferes with the clarity of a message; what Michel Serres calls a parasite, the middle third in a relation between sender and receiver. It is the in-between of perception that shields the (sonic) image from perceptual immediacy, because we are always looking (hearing) through the grain. In Merleau-Ponty's terminology, it is the invisible; not what is literally “invisible”, but what resists perception by not being immediately visible. A great photograph or piece of music never surrenders all of itself to us at once but, through its resistance to immediacy, urges us to go deeper, to view and listen from different angles and perspectives.
What I find enjoyable about analog instant photography is that things are already grainy in the instant of their capture; distorted and refracted through the interplay of light and chemistry. As a medium that works directly with light, photography engages directly with the nascent shaping-process of the sensible world. Light is what extends through things and gives them their shape, as the philosopher Alphonso Lingis says. And in music? When we talk about light in music, it appears to be merely metaphorical. But we speak of bright and dark sounds - say that something sounds glowing or shadowy - with such natural, self-evident conviction that one might wonder whether they really are mere metaphors. After all, isn't a filter a kind of lens? Doesn't reverb really make a sound radiate with light?
Both photography and electronic music are wave-alchemies, all about transforming and transmuting perceptual materials on different wavelengths. I may not have a clinical case of synaesthesia, but looking at photographs I've taken, I do often imagine what they would sound like, and conjure in my inner ear the little noises they might make. And, like many people, I conversely associate sounds with shapes, textures, materials and colors that appear in front of my inner eye. One artist that is working with both music and photography and is explicitly engaging such synaesthetic phenomena is Rod Modell, better known as DeepChord. Apparently, he even organizes all his sounds by color and brightness:
"I have files of green sounds, red sounds, brown sounds etc. Sometimes the mix will call for a green sound with a brightness rating of three, sometimes a green sound with a brightness rating of nine is necessary. Sometimes I listen to a mix and need a red four to complete it. Friends who see my system are always freaked out. Sound isn't always sound, it's floating blobs of sensory-manipulating dark matter. It's all about the overall physiology of tone and understanding how to assemble the pieces into a psychotropic highball."
Modell's photographs are almost always shot at night and drenched in intense, refracting neon-light tones that endlessly radiate and reverberate throughout the nocturnal dark. Like the night, there is something inherently sublime and mysterious about tone. It always presents itself to us as a question, never as an answer. You can listen or stare for an eternity, but tone will never fully reveal itself, because it is "floating blobs of sensory-manipulating dark matter" that do not need us and exist all in themselves, only occasionally granting us a glimpse at what they truly are. Such rare experiences of the true nature of tone tend to be frightening and sublime, because they always point to the vast universe of waves and tones beyond the human.