The Sound of a Photograph (Cont.)

 

While working on Red Room Mississippi, I was reminded of a William Eggleston exhibition I had gone to at the Art institute of Chicago.

Whenever I look at his photos I start to think cinematically. Taking photographs is sometimes like being in the temporal space of a film, and can really be a form cinematography, hence my interest in "scoring" photographs. 

Just as period films need vintage cars from that period, seeing old photos with cars in them dates the photo and I try to get into the headspace of what that world sounded like in terms of the music that might have been on AM radio at the time, or distant muffled music coming from a nearby saloon.

I recall at the time I was thinking Eggleston was the "Ed Ruscha of the South" in the sense that the work was banal and dead-pan and in a strange way--Americana. So I try to make the music sound that way.