Music #12

The idea behind this work was to capture a variety of people's different reactions to music through their eyes. I felt like, since the common saying goes "eyes are the windows to the soul." It would make sense to capture people's reactions through their eyes. I also think it shows a connection between the senses, as something that is heard through the ears can be expressed through the eyes. I wanted to show that by printing the cyanotypes onto sheet music, showing the connection between seeing and hearing.

I used cyanotype prints because I wanted them to look ethereal. I wanted to capture the feeling and much of the general shape of the eyes, but the details weren't the important part in this piece; it was more about the overall feeling that the eyes seemed to give. In printing with cyanotype, many of the details get blurred out or simply aren't strong enough to be captured through the negative. I also felt like, after taking and cropping the original pictures, it was really jarring to have the eyes really big and realistic, so I think in printing them, making them monochromatic, and taking out some of the detail, it felt a little bit more artistic and less jarring, as well as the people became less recognizable. 

I got the idea from an image that I saw online of someone who had done a similar thing and photographed a bunch of eyes in black and white, making them into a collage, almost. I had the idea to connect it to music by having all my subjects listen to music as I was photographing them, so that their reaction had significance towards my inquiry question. It took me. A lot of courage to ask people, even my really close friends, if I could have them listen to a song and then take a picture, as I felt like it wads a really akward situation. Eventually one day though I just asked a bunch of people and collected a bunch of photos. I had to print out onto transparency paper about 7 negatives because I kept having to ajust the contrast and exposure. I ran one test print once I felt like I had the contrast down, but even that I felt like some of them were still too light so I went backa and ajusted the colors one last time. I exposed it on both regular drawing paper and sheet music on the UV light table for 370 seconds. Although the ones on the drawing paper came out better, they all rinsed out quite a bit when I washed them in water afterward. I think in the coming days I'd like to try this again and up the exposure time. I also noticed that the sheet music was so thin that when it was soaking wet it just ripped so easily it was hard to get to dry.