Viewpoint Jon Bentley
Everyone is aware of the music written about cars and driving, but what about the link between certain songs and photography?
At a popular level there’s everything from Prince’s Little Red Corvette to Madness driving in their Morris Minor. Delve deeper and there are bountifully rich seams of material; Johnny Cash building his Cadillac a piece at a time or Kraftwerk’s celebration of the Autobahn. Whatever your musical tastes, the tunes put you behind the wheel, even when you’re not.
I’ve never thought photography and music achieved the same magical synergy. Not that I haven’t treasured some songs on the subject. My personal favourite is Jackson Browne’s Fountain of Sorrow. The great songsmith, best known for his work with the Eagles, insightfully describes the process of taking a portrait and recording a character in a moment. I bought the Late for the Sky LP, on which it appears, back in 1974 and the song often plays in my mind when I’m trying to capture a character with a camera.
Another photo song I’ve long admired is Paul Simon’s exercise in nostalgia, Kodachrome. Its touching exploration of how bright colours can evoke past joys feels even more relevant in the filtered age of Instagram. But maybe I’ve been ignoring photography songs for years without realising it. Once I started looking there were more than I’d thought.
Many are fairly simple in their approach; songs about people who no longer have a real person, just their photo. Like The Cure’s Pictures of You in which singer Robert Smith is haunted by pictures of a girl he’s lost. Or a photo as a substitute for a person as in The Who’s Pictures of Lily where a boy is given a photo of a girl to help him get to sleep - read into that what you will. It works, but he becomes distressed when he can’t meet the girl for real because she died years ago.
Others look a little deeper into the emotions photographs can elicit. Camera by Editors suggests people hide their sadness in photographs as they smile automatically. In People Take Pictures of Each Other, The Kinks’ Ray Davies looks at why people shoot pictures, fathers taking pictures of their mothers, and the sisters of their brothers, just to ‘show that they love one another’, or taking snaps of the summer ‘to prove that it really existed’. Ray also reminisces about ‘pictures of things as they used to be’, sucking his thumb by an oak tree when he was three before being overcome by the emotion and begging not to see the picture any more.
The message in some songs about photos can be very serious indeed. The Manic Street Preachers’ Kevin Carter is about a Pulitzer prize-winning photographer who was traumatised by whether the atrocities he photographed would have happened if he wasn’t there to record them. He took his own life in Johannesburg at the age of 33.
Strange Fruit is perhaps one of the most powerful songs related to photography. It was first written as a poem by Abel Meeropol and sung by Nina Simone and Billie Holiday amongst others. It was inspired by a famous and chilling photograph of a racist lynching that took place in Indiana in 1930 taken by Lawrence Beitler.
There may be fewer songs about photography than cars but they’re often a little, and sometimes a lot, more profound.