How this artist makes photos that feel like symphonies

Jessica Eaton can't carry a tune or keep rhythm, but she's long felt like there's something musical about her photography. Its movements and tones, the interplay of distinct elements, feels the way a song does to her.

The Toronto-based artist is renowned for her experimental and process-driven analog photography, which pushes against the technical limits of what the camera can express. "I make photographs of things that you can't quite ever see," she says. 

Her best-known images, for example, the photographic series cfaal (or Cubes for Albers and LeWitt), transform the eponymous grayscale forms into striking jewel-toned configurations, resembling geometric abstraction or colour field paintings — their wizardry done not through Photoshop, but entirely in-camera. Another series makes radically solarized photos of flowers appear like bas-relief sculptures. Her process routinely involves multiple exposures (sometimes upward of 100 for a single image), a rigorous colour mixing system, temperamental darkroom procedures and the precise orchestration of studio variables. The work not only feels musical to Eaton, but making it is intricate like a symphony. And just as every composer begins by writing a score, notation has become integral to the photographer's artmaking, too. 

CBC Arts recently asked some of the country's best-known creative talents, including visual artists, filmmakers, musicians and authors, for a simple trick they use to overcome obstacles in their work. All that wisdom, inspiration and problem-solving is collected here, in this interactive digital tool called Think Like An Artist. As a longtime fan of Oblique Strategies — the influential creative aid that helped inspire our CBC project — Eaton was excited to contribute a creative prompt of her own:

"Give each action a symbol: write it out
Rework: as poetry, as algebra, as music."

It's a strategy she uses all the time. "I find a good way to get out of classical structure," she says, "is that as two things become integral aspects of whatever you're doing, start to think of them as one." Then continue to group related procedures, she instructs, so maybe five actions become one, or 20 become one. "Then, if you think of it as an equation or a musical symphony — each point is actually more and more and more — it's just a really good way to build complexity without feeling overwhelmed."

For her cfaal series, there were multiple streams of actions she condensed in this way. "A thing on the set had to move, something had to happen with the camera, a backdrop needed to drop," she explains. "I was able to combine physical aspects that would repeat, almost like a choreography between me and my assistant in physical space." Once a chain of unbreakable actions was established, they became a singular element in Eaton's mind.

She began writing notes as she went to track her place within the complicated process. Then, at some point, she began drafting them ahead of time, like a score. And that's when the complexity boomed. 

Whenever she saw a "Y" for yellow in her notes, it meant eight pops of green at full blast and six pops of red at an eighth of strobe power, she remembers. The symbol alone entailed a dozen steps. "It was not literally algebra," she says, "but it absolutely borrowed from that as a strategy to be able to do something infinitely complex in what has become a kind of knowable, repeatable and simplified way."

Producing many iterations within the cfaal series, she needed some way to judge the outcomes. That's when she decided she wanted to be able to "hear" the photos. "I want it to give me a feeling, and I want that feeling to shift from one picture to the next," she says. "In the very latest cubes, I could look at them and they felt like each one was making its own little chunk of a symphony."

The whole process has evolved, she's come to realize, not just from the demands of her studio practice, but from her experience of the world, too. Eaton recently learned she has something called "cookie-bite hearing loss," which means she doesn't hear the mid-range frequencies of the audio spectrum. The condition was likely congenital, she says, which explains why she's always had difficulty performing music, learning other languages and holding conversations in a crowd. The discovery has put a new lens on her notation, the images she makes and the feelings these produce in her as well. It's almost as if she's developed a language to make a synesthetic kind of music.  

"I did not do it in a manner where there could be a guidebook," Eaton says. "Something changed every single time I went back to shoot. So it is not a completed language. It is not an alphabet that exists. It is a very personal, emotional, idiosyncratic one that was tailored to myself."

Nevertheless, there's much an artist can learn, she says, from this basic creative exercise of viewing your work through a new context with a different value system.

"Say you're a writer, even if it's not poetry, do you not read the work out loud?" she asks. "If you're a musician working on a piece, do you not lie in a park under the sun and extrapolate it as dancing or colours? People always do that in these sorts of pursuits. And I would think, even if it's math or science, that there's the dream — there's a dreamer part, right? — that you have to always visit every now and then, if you're truly engaged in what you do."