SALVE

Sierra Metro, Edinburgh

22/2/22 - 03/04/22 • 10am-2pm daily
new photography, music and writing

”All I will say is that these images, these sounds, these words emerge from suffering and from a belief connected to that suffering that is dignified.”

“Letter” by John Douglas Millar, from the SALVE exhibition publication.

PHOTOGRAPHs

Untitled Altarpiece (a fourteen panel photographic altar), and works from the series Altar for Guglielmo, Verbacruce and Roman Paintings will be displayed, in addition to a new single-edition artist’s photo-book, AVLA.

MUSIC

Each of the pieces in Music for William was made by transposing the hexadecimal colour information from four reduced photographs into “music”.

“I took 16 photographs I made in Florence and reduced them to 6x9 inches at one pixel per inch. This made each photo a simple pattern of 54 rectangles of colour. I sampled each of the hexadecimal values of these colours and made a note of the values. I then converted each number or letter from the hexadecimal code into a musical note value. For the key of C major, for example, 1 is equal to C, 2 is equal to D, 3 is equal to E and so on (with 0 as a pause). Having translated the codes into musical notes, I played them via a little midi keyboard into Garageband to make midi tracks for each picture, so that I could control the instrument, tempo, velocity, basic compression and so on. Each of the pieces has four “voices”; one on each of four octaves.

I exported the scores into musical notation and sent these to five musicians, who either played the notes as they had been written, or interpreted them into a new piece of music.”

WRITING

“Images are a way of thinking, just as narrative is (although we must be careful not to confuse the two). Photography has become, and remains, a particular and universal way of thinking. It may be quite a desolate way of thinking, quite a mechanical and soulless way of thinking. But it also seems to me, like the Bible and Kant and the others, far too important an influence on the world around us to ignore – its impact on our beings is too immediate and pressing. It seems like a duty, a responsibility, to engage with the photographic. With what we see via photography and how it becomes a knowledge. Or even, sometimes, a law.”

From the transcribed lecture “Dust and Gold”, in the SALVE exhibition publication.

–

In addition to the exhibition publication for SALVE, a new book of photographic writing, PHOTOLOGY, will be launched during the exhibition –

From PHOTOLOGY –

16. The photographic declines jealousy by concentrating our attention on the time between the camera and the things in the world.