A Mosaic From Music

I feel like my past experiences heavily influenced the images I thought of when I listened to this song. I was also influenced by Brandon Stanton, the photographer for Humans of New York. He uses images to tell the story of people living in a very urban environment. When I first heard this song I immediately thought of something urban and dark with lots of lights passing by. Towards the middle of the song I was starting to get a strong metallic feel. It also gave me a huge throwback feeling. All of these thoughts went into the photos I took. The song itself had an interesting rhythmic beat, but with a lot of different sounds and mixes thrown in. This gave me a grunge feel.

Going along with the throwback theme, I decided to take all the photos on a polaroid camera. The image itself gives a vintage look. It has faded colors and imperfect image quality. This reflects the feel of the song in many different ways. The song feels complete, but at the same time it is mixed and different. It was interesting to see how some of the photos were damaged with water and it made the photo look even more grunge. This matched the images the song gave me even better.

The content of the photos also reflects the feel of the song. Because it seemed like I couldn’t make out everything in the song, I took all the photos in relative darkness. There are subtle shapes or lights that appear in a dark area. It reminds me of the mixes or audio samples that came in during the rhythm. There are also several items that disappear into darkness, just like these samples fade into the overall song. The composition is also always off kilter and tend to have bright random colors. This was to show how the song throws in random pieces of music and it throws off the listener just slightly. It also shows how these pieces are loud and intrusive, but still add to what is happening in the music.

At the end of the song, there were a lot of mouth popping noises that reminded me of the television show Seinfeld. My mom absolutely loves this show, so I started to think of her. Since I kept thinking of the show and in turn, my mother, I decided to take a photo of her. She wouldn’t let me take the photo of her by herself, so I took one of both of us. These noises came at a random part of the song, so I decided to make this photo look a lot different than the rest of them.

I compiled them in an imperfect way and took another image with my phone. I really felt like this showed an overall visual style that reflected how I felt about the song.