Photogenia, for flute, clarinet in B♭, violin, cello, piano

Composition

Photogenia arose from my research into the history of photography and music. One of the first photographic pioneers, William Henry Fox Talbot, was highly experimental in perfecting his process of ‘photogenic drawing’ in the 1830s: whereby a chemically sensitised piece of paper was exposed to sunlight with an object laid over it. The result would be a white copy of the image, whereby light could not pass due to lack of transparency, with the rest of the paper becoming dark. Through these experiments, Talbot had many photographs which were deemed failures, not used to showcase the process, but kept in Talbot’s collection, some with notes written on them. Geoffrey Batchen’s recent book on this topic exhibits many of these experiments, many of which are beautiful through their undesired abstraction, and I was moved to write a piece which explores the notion of early photographic ‘failure’: a balancing act of light, chemistry, and human interventions in the name of visual reproduction.

The music broadly covers the act of these failed photographic experiments. Beginning by sensitizing the paper, then exposing it to light, and producing an uncanny image of ‘almost representation’; an ‘almost photograph’ through chemical reactions. The final section of the music embodies the resultant image; now stable, but with an emergent energy of liminal representation. It shows us something, but we aren’t sure what.

Within this work are images from past musical works – snapshots of pieces composed between 2020 and 2022 (e.g. Crow Forms, Arrays, Ennui(t), H(AI)KU). These are mutated borrowings, themselves undergoing the same imperfections that Talbot’s initial photographs did. In this way, the work is quasi-autographic, and draws upon photographic discourses of memory and time.

Authors: Metcalf, T

• Publication status: Not published
• Publication date: 2025-02-21
• Language: English