Rather than writing something myself this month, I’ve decided to share an excerpt from ‘The Passengers’ by Will Ashon. It’s an exquisite collection of responses from anonymous members of the public from across the UK, offering individual perspectives, experiences and secrets, things that unite us, things that make our lived experience unique. I've no idea who the author of this quote is, but it really resonated with me. I highly recommended picking up a copy of the book.
"There's a quote that I really like and I can’t remember who it’s by, but it’s by a snooty foreigner who said that the English don’t like music, they just like the noise it makes. I think that completely describes my relationship with music. I have no understanding of music, but I do like the noise it makes. And I feel the same about photography. I don’t understand photography in a way that a university-educated person might, but I like the way it looks, and I don’t think that’s a flippant thing to say about either of them, actually. The thing I like most about music is its timbres - it’s the textures, it’s the surfaces, it’s the way that this incredibly abstract art form can change your state of mind and get you into worlds that don’t exist. Just a load of waveforms in the ether. And exactly the same is true of photography, whether it be abstract or not - patters on a screen or a piece of paper, textures and colours and things that are not that dissimilar from sounds can get you into a space that nothing else can."
"One of the things I say about photography is that if it’s not better than being there, it’s not worth it. So if it’s just a record of an instant, if you’d been there you would’ve seen that. Fine, great, there’s a place for that. But photography at its finest is when it adds something that ind of wasn’t there-although obviously it was there cos it’s just a photograph. When you put things in a frame, when you cut around experiences, that makes it different. It’s about the totality in a way, isn’t it, That everything in that picture is meant to be there. In the same way that everything in a piece of music is meant to be there, even if it’s improvised and there’s accidents and all the rest of it. There’s still a reason why those fluffed notes are there and that’s part of it. And the same for photography. It’s absolutely fine for it to be messy round the edges, or wonky, or whatever. It’s an editing process."
"In a photograph, or in a piece of music, all well-created textures are beautiful. You can take a photograph of something horrible and you can make it beautiful through the textures, and the same is true of music. You can get some really harsh, horrible sounds and you can mash them together in some horrible ways, and it has a beauty. And if you can hold the space, as it were, then you can enjoy and appreciate the texture of any photograph - any good photograph, whatever that means. And I guess, if you wanted to be philosophical, you could say the same thing about life, although obviously it’s an awful lot harder when it’s punching you in the face and it hurts than when it’s a piece of paper, or some waveforms. But there is a beauty to all of it, even the stuff that really seems like it isn’t."
This article is taken from my February Mailout, which also features some of my latest cultural highlights.
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