Mikael Pettersson: "Photography and Music"

Mikael Pettersson, Uppsala universitet: "Photography and Music: Ansel Adams meets Cage, Richter and Richards"

Abstract
In her recent paper ‘Music, Visualisation and the Multi-stage Account of Photography’, Dawn Wilson explores, from a philosophical perspective, an analogy proposed by Ansel Adams between music and fine art photography. Wilson’s account also ‘offers an invitation to theorists and practitioners to expand the music-photography analogy by considering wider varieties of music’. In the talk, I will take up this invitation by discussing photos of absences and darkness (or what could be called ‘silent film’) and silent music; how prints could be seen as being ‘performances’, as Adams and Wilson suggest; covers and recordings in pop music; and comparable ‘covers’ in photography.