Music is the only art that requires two distinct kinds of artists: the composer and the performer. Sometimes the two are found in the same person; for instance, Franz Liszt, Frédéric Chopin, George Enescu, or Sergei Rachmaninov were not only remarkable composers but also extraordinary performers. Such occurrences, however, do not alter the statement above: without a performer, the score remains silent. Literature, poetry, photography, painting, and sculpture do not rely on a performer as a bridge between creator and audience. Actors may indeed reveal hidden nuances in a play, but the text itself remains accessible to the reader even in the absence of performance. A musical score, by contrast, requires interpretation to become music in the first place.
As a trained classical musician, it is easier for me to approach photography through musical concepts and principles. No matter how much I practice or learn about photography, I am not sure I shall ever reach the level of knowledge and experience I have attained in classical music.
It so happened that, while photographing on a cold, misty February morning this year, by the shore of a nearby lake, a question formed in my mind: is the photographer a creator like the composer, or rather an interpreter like the performer?
The quick answer was: well, the photographer—at least the nature photographer—is not quite a creator. The photographer does not invent what lies before the lens but instead responds, with varying degrees of inspiration and skill, to the features nature reveals. The mist, the lake, the bare branches I looked at that morning were not of my making. Indeed, any other person standing beside me at that moment would have seen exactly the same scene.
The fact that photographers are not automatically considered creators in the same way as composers, painters, or writers is not necessarily a disadvantage, but simply a reality one should acknowledge. All the same, the mere act of bringing something into existence from imagination—whether in music, literature, or painting—does not automatically make the creation valuable. Even the greatest composers produced works that did not withstand the test of time, and rightly so. For every “great” composer, history records perhaps at least twenty lesser ones who left no lasting trace.
As a parenthesis: in today’s saturated market, where one may find anywhere between ten and a thousand recordings of the same piece, some record labels have adopted the strategy of releasing unknown works by obscure composers, performed by equally obscure interpreters. The results, however, are often questionable.
If the photographer is not a creator in the sense that a composer is—bringing into existence a symphony that until then lived only in imagination—then is the photographer merely an interpreter? This would not suffice, I am afraid. Not only because neither nature nor photography requires an interpreter to translate an abstract code into something accessible to the viewer, but also because the level of artistry attained by a musical performer surpasses, in complexity and skill, whatever an interpretative photographer can achieve by pressing the shutter, shifting the tripod, or adjusting the focal length of the lens.
So, if the photographer is not a creator, and if being an interpreter is not enough, what remains for him to be?
It took me months to put those thoughts into words, and I felt it was important for my photography to do so.
To be a creator, a photographer needs more than simply to respond emotionally to the display of natural features. He must place those features in relation to one another (in some way other than the eternal leading line connecting foreground and background) and within a context that adds an additional dimension to what is seen. Doing so requires more analytical and conceptual thinking and less sentimental or emotional reaction. Fascination is essential, yes; superficial emotion, rather not. Creativity does not unfold upon the foundation of emotion, but upon the foundation of knowledge. I cannot side with those photographers who elevate “self‑expression” before their audience while downplaying—by silence—the importance of deep knowledge of the art they practice and its aesthetic standards, though that, perhaps, is material for another essay. I suspect, some take this approach so as not to unsettle their audience because in truth, mastering an art requires constant effort. The composers we celebrate today possessed very good knowledge of compositional techniques, harmony, musical forms, and genres.
Composers themselves rarely inscribed personal emotions into their scores. Despite biographers’ efforts to argue otherwise, the events of their lives seldom found direct expression in their music. At times they produced programmatic works intended to evoke non‑musical ideas—Beethoven’s Pastoral Symphony, Vivaldi’s Four Seasons, or Berlioz’s Symphonie Fantastique. Yet even these were not designed to convey private feelings, let alone emotions.
Let us now look at the interpreter. In classical music the interpreter is strictly bound to the score. Faithfulness to the score is non‑negotiable (there are exceptions, such as the Canadian pianist Glenn Gould, who allowed himself many liberties—one of the very few pianists to have done so meaningfully). The interpreter cannot remove or add parts, cannot play forte if the composer has written piano, cannot choose a tempo at will, and some composers even specified fingering or exact pedal usage. This apparently places an immense burden on the interpreter: with such narrow leeway, how can his interpretation differ from another’s? Worse still, the challenge is compounded by the vast archive of recordings against which every contemporary performance is inevitably compared.
The short answer is: exceptional interpreters do not even attempt to free themselves from the constraints of the score. What makes them remarkable is technical accomplishment of the highest order, combined with purity of sound. This level of performance is reached by very few, and it requires a certain maturity that comes only with age. Lesser (or younger) interpreters often try to compensate for what they lack in these qualities by adopting a more emotional style of playing. There is indeed a musical term for this: rubato. It refers precisely to those tiny liberties in tempo and dynamics that are permitted without breaking the oath of fidelity to the score. Rubato may work up to a certain level (especially in Romantic music) and is sometimes even noted in the score by the composer, but the heavier it is, the more artificial and bloated the interpretation becomes.
Rubato is to musical interpretation what heavy digital processing is to photography. And if you are serious about your work, you must be honest enough to ask yourself: if these heavy garments are set aside, will the photograph still have something to say? Or as an interpreter: if you abandon that affected manner of playing (for this is what rubato is, after all), meant to display emotion in the hope it will impress the public, what will remain of the interpretation? In photography, just as in musical performance, heavy processing—or rubato—is sometimes used merely to conceal deficiencies beneath a veneer of expressiveness. Yet the essential question remains: if one strips away these embellishments, does the work still speak? In both photography and performance, imprudent reliance on such devices often reveals that behind the impressive surface lies little of substance.
It was important for me to become conscious of these facts, though the immediate effect was that I gave up photography for several months, and I am still not entirely out of it. I often miss that “additional dimension” in my photographic pursuit, whatever it may be (I fear some more months of heavy thinking lie ahead). But I am old enough now to know that finding answers is a long process. And sometimes one does not find them.
