Music + Photography: A Unified Body of Work
13 years ago I picked up my brother’s hand-me-down classical guitar. What began as a fascination soon turned into a serious passion, and before long, I was learning the piano and trying my hand at the drums. The first 10 years of my introduction to the discipline were guided by music and music only — a sort of one-sided approach to the creative process.
As of late, visuals have taken the upper hand. Music has long been my creative outlet, but photography has become just as essential to my writing. After inheriting my dad’s 35mm film camera and hauling it on a surf trip up the CA coast, I was instantly hooked on the surprise and anticipation of waiting on the results of the scanned negative.
When I released my debut EP this Spring, my album art and the accompanying images were all original — the first time I had officially released music and photography together. The music inspired the imagery, but ultimately came together as one, unified body of work. In my search for a studio and producer, I decided on The Bomb Shelter in Nashville. Known for his work with Alabama Shakes, Andrija Tokic records all of his projects to 2-inch tape — a meticulous, unpredictable process, much like shooting film. More often than not you have to start over to get the perfect take, a reality I was familiar with in the analog world of photography.
Generally my sound is softer and characterized by acoustic guitars and fingerpicking. My voice tends to be more reserved and sits further back in the mix. In the same vein, I’ve tried taking a back seat with my photography. Inspired by the classic American photographer Robert Frank, I try to emulate a wallflower, capturing the spontaneous, natural moments of the mundane day-to-day. I live for natural lighting, capturing a moment, and honing an authentic voice, much as I have focused on with music. While my sound is not always spontaneous, it still takes a back seat aesthetic, just as I strive to capture through my photography.
At the moment I’m designing the album artwork for my debut full-length album. Choosing a 1600 x 1600 assortment of pixels to define an entire collection of song is a burden, but the closer I can relate the message of the music and lyrics to the visual, the more cohesive the body of work.
When I first started writing songs in 8th grade, I figured songwriting was a binary process: you either start with a chord progression or a lyric, and work from there; but since taking up photography, it’s been a revelation and a joy to find how two entirely separate disciplines can guide the creative process all the same.
