Musicality is related to the beauty, the aesthetics and the concreteness of music, but it also refers to what is born within, which is inherent to the musical person. Almost all good musicians, if we observe them, carry that musicality in their person. Their posture, their way of walking, the expressions or the space they occupy. That musicality is what American photographer Deborah Feingold captures with her camera.
Although aware of the presence of the camera, the portrayed appears to be playing, creating, negotiating his image with the photographer. Although the compositions are sometimes complex, naturalness is what always strangely prevails, within these moments built to the millimeter. The viewer perceive the experience of a photographer who knows how to prepare her canvas so that at the moment of shooting it is the improvisation that prevails, the ease, the fluidity of the moment and the encounter. And in this she behaves totally like a Jazz musician. Miles Davis (with whom Deborah had the opportunity to crosspatch with) does not improvise on an empty open field, the king of the bebop, like his friend Coltrane or many others, improvised on a specific melody, once absorbed and assimilated. When they dominate it, is when they can put it together and subjugate it innumerable times, undo it, dissect it and always return to it as if nothing had happened.
The image implies a time factor that is irreversible, but that is what ends up creating a good photograph.It would not be the same half a second before or after. There is an exact moment that makes the photograph and that moment in the portrait is a moment of confluence between the photographer and the photographed, a supreme moment that is engraved on the plate and it is the result of all the ingredients that were carefully prepared for that image, added to the improvisation of the moment and united by an amalgam of time and magic that is the only thing that create images as those of Deborah Feingold . Then, analysis will come with the years, the time, what happened to the portrayed, or if an image became an icon or not, but, the important thing, the essential, was there dormant from the exact moment it was shot.
Diego Alonso
Diego Alonso is an author specialized in photography. He lives and works in Madrid.
Deborah Feingold, Musical Portraits
November 30, 2017 to January 30, 2018
Mondo Galeria
San Lucas 9
2804 Madrid
Spain
