Visual Music: How Jackson Browne and Diane Arbus Hit the Same Sweet Spot
“Take it Easy,” the Jackson Browne version, is never far from my mind, a tune that evokes powerful emotions and transports me back to the excitement of a world and life in front of me. We all have that song, a tune that becomes a talisman to our youth, when life was opening up like a flower, each moment our synapses gathering millions of bits of information and electrifying our memories. That song, in the backseat of a car driving back to campus from a concert, flipped the switch and embedded its melody deep in my consciousness. Whenever I hear it, my entire body sings along.
This is not an uncommon phenomenon. Researchers are studying how music affects us in hopes of using it to relieve depression and alleviate dementia. Rhythm, rhyme and alliteration unlock passages that bring forward deep memories of not only moments but emotions. And it all seems to happen in our youth. Songs we hear later in life, while we may sing along, rarely have that same engrained in the soul quality.
The photography I first discovered in my youth has a similar affect on me, the visual cues of light and shadow freezing forever a singular moment that never changes, becoming an emotional bridge to when I first discovered the power of both imagery and myself. The photographs that struck me as a teenager are still the touchstones of photography for me. Like music, they moved me to a different understanding of life and possibilities. It helped me define myself and bring my understanding of who I was, and wanted to become, into focus.
I am constantly inspired by new photographic works and different ways artists have found to express themselves visually though photography, but, like the music of my youth, none have as deep a place in my heart as those I was first introduced to in my teens and early twenties. It is a time when we are discovering ourselves, and like music, these images became part of us. They were important to my development as a photographer and helped me learn my own visual language, something I speak with the same concepts, honed over decades, that I learned then through the act of looking.
One of the most reproduced images in the world is Diane Arbus’s portrait of twins and it resonates with me like that Jackson Browne song. My attempt at a critique would be redundant of a thousand other critiques so I won’t attempt to add anything new. It is a modern masterpiece, an icon of late mid-century photography. What I am interested in is what it evokes each time I visit it anew.
Despite its ubiquity, it still stirs my soul in the way listening to “Take It Easy” helped define my spirit in the 70s. My senses seem keener when I turn the page and unexpectedly, it appears, and I respond, like my hand reflexively turning up the volume when that tune comes on the radio.
It’s that song that is never far from my head, and when it plays it isn’t Jackson Browne, it’s me, a touchstone to who I became the moment I first heard it, the power of my youth being defined in each note. And so it is with the photographs that first seared themselves into my consciousness.
They no longer belong to Diane Arbus or Jackson Browne, they have become part of me, my world view, my expression of myself. Arbus’s photograph has become my visual music, never far away and each time I see it, it washes over me like that song, a tune I keep humming long after the music, and the image, fades.
