Monday, January 18, 2016

Music Mosaic

Audiomachine - An Unfinished Life






Listening to the song “An Unfinished Life” by Audiomachine emphasizes particular feelings from inside of me. A feeling of anticipation, dread, uneasiness, but also a feeling of hope. The photographs that I took really capitalized on these feelings and made them real for me. Just about all of the photos are underexposed giving them a darker feeling, but some of them have lighter values that show that hopeful emotion. It is similar to the painting “Fisherman at Sea” by Joseph Turner. There is a very dark undertone to the painting, with a little bit of light illuminating the fishers. Some of the photos that I captured have a similar feeling to them, such as the picture with the tools and the picture with the lone tree.

Another element is implemented in a few of the photographs by the contrast of a single object against the background. There are two specific examples of this, one is of the man, and the other is of the tree. They both represent loneliness and expectation within a gray world. These were conscious decisions that were made when I was taking the pictures.

The day that I took these photographs was very rainy and cold. This miserable environment added to the context of the pictures. It made the feelings in the song feel more real as I was thinking of the song in my head while framing and taking the pictures. However, the fact that I was with friends while taking the pictures gave the photography adventure a more positive light, which is emphasized in the pictures.

Working on this assignment has helped me connect more with Annie Dillard when she was talking about seeing life on a smaller, more detailed scale. A lot of my photographs were wide angled shots of landscape, but I did experiment more with taking close up pictures of rocks and other geological features. It helped to look at something in nature, and figure out the best way to manipulate it in such a way to make a beautiful picture with meaning, even if the object in real life was just a rock. An example is with the photograph of the snow on the rock. There is character there; a rock with lots of grooves and imperfections is covered with a layer of snow. The snow covers up the imperfections, but leaves the rock with little individuality. I would have never seen that in the rock if I didn’t put forth the effort to focus on it and give it character through the photograph.


“An Unfinished Life” is a beautiful song that encapsulates the feelings of hope amidst much despair and loneliness. I feel that the content and the context of the photos provided emphasizes these emotions and makes the song feel more real and personal to me.





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