Preludes and Fugues, 2013

“Whenever I can feel a Bach fugue in my work I know I have arrived”. When, as a cub photographer, I first read this quote from the Daybooks of Edward Weston, I was electrified by the pronouncement. A few years prior I had discovered the world of classical music and discovered a serious personal response to this music. When I read the Weston quote I had just discovered photography as my own expressive medium and in the manner of an Epiphany I realized that one could be a stimulus for the other. Over the years and decades I have constantly felt my work to be a visual response to music. One of the Apollonian summits of western music is Johann Sebastian Bach's "The Well-Tempered Clavier, Books One and Two". Both a tutorial and a summation of Bach's keyboard writing, the "WTC", nearly three hundred years since creation, continues to set the highest standard and inspire. This suite of forty eight images is a visual homage to Bach’s “The Well-Tempered Clavier”. Each pair of photographs represents a prelude and fugue in all the major and minor keys as expressed by Bach. Each pair of photographs relate to each other in a sometimes similar and other times oppositional or dissonant way and can be viewed as abstract thought as much as straight image.