SOUNDS OF EMOTIONS
One sound and a tenth of a second are enough for the brain to recognize emotions – say Canadian scientists. Sounds appear to be the most primal but also the fastest way to convey emotions. Music, with its complexity, can carry an incredibly heavy emotional load, put us in a good mood, evoke anxiety, sadness, or euphoria. The phenomenon of concerts, live music, lies in influencing our senses through the combination of sound, light, and the energy connecting the musicians with each other and the audience.
Fascinated by the atmosphere of concerts, I searched for those moments when the musicians’ emotions reach their climax, when it seems that they are at the peak of excitement and have lost control of their emotions. To capture these fleeting moments, I couldn’t just be an observer; I had to become involved in this emotional game, in co-experiencing, allowing me to anticipate and capture decisive moments.
Introduction to Zdzisław Słoma Słomski’s exhibition:
Before writing the introduction to Tomasz GRZYB’s exhibition titled “SOUNDS OF EMOTION,” I had a jumble in my head. The ideas that came to me didn’t give any guarantee that I could encapsulate the multifaceted content of this introduction in a concise text form. And yet, these photographs inspire me to write about many aspects related to their creation, and it would be a shame to leave even one of them out.
Don’t topics like these arise here:
– Emotions of people connected with music,
– Capturing in portraits the decisive moment or, rather, the moment with the greatest emotional charge that expresses the essence of that moment,
– Searching for moments of the highest emotional intensity, the truth about a person and their sensitivity,
– The author’s emotions during “hunting” for the emotions of the musicians, not necessarily as a reaction to the music but rather as a response to people’s emotions.
Only, will anyone want to read about this…?
So here’s a different proposal. Let’s do it this way… I’ll open my makeshift library and quote from it the statements of several truly great photographers. I’ll start with the title. It will also be a quote, or rather a combination of two quotes, put together for the purposes of this text. I hope their authors will forgive me.
“Between the skin and the shirt – expressing impressions!”
Tomasz Grzyb’s photographs
It’s starting well… so I’ll continue… Here are those quotes:
– “The most difficult thing in photography is the portrait. You have to place the camera between the skin and the shirt of the person being photographed.” – Henri Cartier-Bresson
– “Think about a photo before taking it and after. Never during. The secret is time. You don’t have to act quickly. The person being photographed must forget about you, and when that happens, you have to act very quickly.” – Henri Cartier-Bresson
– “To photograph is to hold one’s breath when all faculties converge in the face of fleeting reality. It’s at that precise moment that mastering an image becomes a great physical and intellectual joy.” – Henri Cartier-Bresson
– “Photography is not about looking, it’s about feeling. If you can’t feel what you’re looking at, then you’re never going to get others to feel anything when they look at your pictures.” – Don McCullin
– “A picture is an expression of impressions. If beauty isn’t there in us, how can we recognize it?” – Ernst Haas
– “Photography is not only a print on photosensitive paper; it’s also a mirror of the world. Sometimes crooked, sometimes faithful, it’s an extension in time of the fleeting gaze of the eye, a tool for shaping minds.” – Urszula Czartoryska
– “If you can smell the street by looking at the photo, it’s a street photograph.” – Bruce Gilden
– “I think photographs should provoke and not show what is already known. It doesn’t require great strength or magic to reproduce someone’s face in a photograph. The magic is in seeing people in a completely new way.” – Duane Michals
– “There’s one thing the photograph must contain: the humanity of the moment.” – Robert Frank
– “In photography, what counts isn’t the camera but the eye.” – Bill Brandt
– “Pick a theme and work on it until you’ve exhausted it… It has to be something you really love or hate.” – Dorothea Lange
– “Look with your eyes, see with your heart.” – David duChemin
– “If your pictures aren’t good enough, you’re not close enough.” – Philip Jones Griffiths
Don’t these quoted sentences fully apply to the photographs presented by Tomasz Grzyb? I leave the answer to this rhetorical question to you.
