From archive to artistry: The musical lives of old photos
Words by Jem Rice In my dreams of releasing a second-rate indie EP, I think of plastering my great grandmother’s face on the cover, for no reason other than that she is beautiful.
go? The album’s blurry yet lush set of instruments mirrors such narrative complexity, pulling listeners into a vortex of grief and euphoria.
The photograph’s chemical sheen seems to solidify her laugh, making the air around her appear blue. This is one of many family pictures my grandfather has saved on his computer, dating back to the early 1950s. While he pans through his own memories in his cluttered office, I look on with a greedy and perhaps overly romantic pair of eyes that see nothing but artistic potential. You don’t have to dive very far into a contemporary indie playlist to be bombarded by ambiguous, often poor quality album covers, drawn from artists’ own family archives. In their inscrutability, it’s easy to forget that these images are often intimately tied to the music they overlay. Take Psychopomp (2016) by Japanese Breakfast, whose cover features frontwoman Michelle Zauner’s mother, with the music reflecting the aftermath of her death by cancer. The photo seems to capture a fleeting moment of this woman’s joy, but one in which audiences are uncertain of where to orient themselves — as Emma Garland of Vice asks, is her hand reaching out to hold us, or letting us
Album: Psychopomp Year: 2016 Artist: Japanese Breakfast Label: Yellow K Records
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29/3/2023 10:38 am