In the PBS Ansel Adams documentary, there was one section that really struck me… remember that Ansel was an accomplished pianist…

John Szarkowski: I’ve tried to explain to myself why it is that there are so many distinguished photographers who are interested in music…. You can make certain parallels between the photographic gray scale and the musical scale, the diatonic chromatic scales, and chord structures. Certainly, it was important to Ansel’s way of thinking, or perhaps even way of feeling — he would talk about chords of tone, he insisted that the photograph be, seem to be, tonally complete, tonally fulfilled, resolved, and that it could have no holes in it. Of course, that’s fundamentally the classical idea of fundamental technique — you’re not supposed to look at the piece of paper, you look through it. It’s like a window, and anytime there’s a hole in that photograph, that makes it turn to paper, it ruins the illusion.

I like the analogy of the tones of a photograph working the brain much like chords of music. Ansel, with the Zone System, made the analogy a lot easier to see, with the quantification of the tones in an image. It’s then really easy to think of the different light and dark tones in an image as notes, and the image as a whole as a chord.

I want to take the analogy further, though, and think of a whole image as a song. But first, a quick tangent:

Eye tracking has been able to give great insight into how the visual perception system works, including how people look at images. When people look at a painting or a photograph, their eyes move through the image in often predictable patterns. The brain is drawn to focus on things like eyes and hands and bright areas and whatever else it thinks is foreground, and seeks them out first while ignoring the background until the image has been explored. While no-one looks at an image the exact same way, the brain is predictable enough that common composition rules like “watch out for bright areas near the edge of an image” can be drawn from it.

So, now let’s combine these two ideas of images tones as notes, and the eye moving through an image. As the brain scans over the changing “notes”, we have a song playing. Everyone plays their own song, but images with a strong visual hierarchy will lead most people though in image in a similar fashion. The main areas of visual interest become the chorus, as the eyes keep returning to them, while the rest of the image becoming the verses and bridges.

I think you can take this analogy a lot farther, if you want. Is a high-contrast image loud? Are small textures fast notes? Would you consider a dark image be in minor key? A series of images together can be thought of as movements in the same symphony. Those may be stretching it, but I think it’s fair to say that the composition of an image plays a big part in the song it plays — how the brain scans the image determines where the chorus is, and other areas the are scanned less are the tones for the bridges and verses.

That said, tonal composition certainly is not the only measure of the image. The subject has its own emotional impact and meaning. I’d like to think that the subject provides the lyrics in our analogy.

I’d like to thank Tammy Frederick, it was an e-mail from her that kicked my brain into thinking about this.

And, for the record, I am a horrible pianist.