i’m back in austin this weekend for a shoot, and once again i’m wondering why i don’t live here. right now: i’m at my favorite burger, beer, and darts joint, crown and anchor, watching my texas longhorns in the big 12 tournament semifinals, and it occurs to me – if i plan this out, i could be back here for good in a year.
dallas is crushing my spirit. it’s time for a change. austin, you’re on alert…
and so it begins…
having dinner at a friend’s recently, i was exposed to a russian painter whose imagery is breathtaking. since i saw the two originals on my friend’s wall, i have been haunted by and fascinated with igor melnikov.
“for me, these are not portraits of children, but portraits of human souls,” says moscow-born artist igor melnikov. each is a picture “of a soul immersed in itself, reticent, perplexed, searching for and preserving a hope. if you take the message of this portrait to your heart, it is a portrait of you.”
“I often find that my subjects are perceived incorrectly, as children’s faces that are meant to be merely touching.”
“The face of an adult is biography; the face of a child is metaphysics,” he says. “I don’t like poetic generalizations, particularly about my own work. But, if I can dare to qualify the subject that interests me most of all, it is this: the little, weak human beings coming into this huge, brutal, senseless world, and being unwanted, uninteresting, and unloved by anyone. Ultimately, the existential conflict is expressed most clearly as the awakening conscience of the little human being in the face of the cosmos.”
melnikov has a book of his thoughts and works called melnikov/ pictures. it is phenomenal. i highly recommend buying it… if you can find it!
when people hear good music, it makes them homesick for something they have never had and never will have. ~ edgar watson howe
my friends and family might say that i’m obsessed with music. i would like to think that i’m not obsessed with anything, but i will whole-heartedly admit that if music were not a reality, i would not want to be alive.
were it not for music, we might in these days say, the Beautiful is dead. ~ benjamin disraeli
without music, life would be a mistake. ~ friedrich wilhelm nietzsche
so it always happens that i love to shoot these things that i am most passionate about, but practically, i just shoot music for fun. it’s very hard to make any substantial living shooting music. however, a few months ago, i went to an avett brothers show with a few friends, and captured some images that i really liked. they were different than any performance work i’ve done before, and i’ve been thinking of entering them in a contest or something.
i just received an email today about the pdn/ billboard summer music photo contest, and i decided it might be fun to enter a few images. but it’s very hard to edit your own work sometimes, so here’s where you, the lovely passer-by, come in…
please help!! the deadline is august 29, and i’d like to narrow these down to 3 or 4 of the best images for two of the categories, performance and spontaneous moment. it’s always better to have many sets of eyes seeing from many different perspectives, than just one. so, either email me directly (andrew@andrewslatonphoto.com), or post your comments here… please!
thanks much in advance…
the only proof he needed of the existence of God was music. ~ kurt vonnegut
a painter paints pictures on canvas. but musicians paint their pictures on silence. ~ leopold stokowski
music washes away from the soul the dust of everyday life. ~ berthold auerbach
music is the language of the spirit. it opens the secret of life bringing peace, abolishing strife. ~ kahlil gibran
men profess to be lovers of music, but for the most part they give no evidence in their opinions and lives that they have heard it. ~ henry david thoreau
all images © andrew r. slaton | photographer 2008
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