Photographic Fungibility

 

When I was researching images for Music For Photographs last Spring, the NFT was trending. As I continued to look at images for the album a thought came to me on this whole idea of fungibility. While trying to decide which Brassai image to use, I realized all of his work is iconic. He's so different than other photographers in that he made that kind of photography that became iconic, particularly foggy nights, which became the template for the "noir" look in cinema, and ultimately a cliche that all photographers want to pursue--even I did it on a few occasions.

The whole idea of mechanical reproduction makes things more fungible and that can happen with anything. It's just the way our minds work, the way society works and why is one photo more iconic than another when many people were taking pictures of the same thing? We live in a fungible world. There aren't many things that are unique anymore, which is part of the reason that I wanted to do this album. I wanted to explore the world of a photograph. 

When you take a look at the locations in which iconic photographs were taken it's just a regular place. You see it at noon the next day where the photo was taken the night before and it's just an ordinary place--it's fungible like a lot of places you know. Paris is unique because you can readily identify it because of the architecture. But in many places in the US, or even in the world now, the
architecture is so fungible that you can't tell what country it's in. One of the challenges with the
album was that I had to avoid cliche at the same time as I embracing the cliche in order to write the "soundtrack".