“David Byrne”. 1983. ©Deborah Feingold.

20 of the best portraits by Deborah Feingold make this exhibition an unmatchable tour through the last decades of a century (XXth) when popular culture was invented and that musicians were turned into great visual aspirations beyond their musical talents.

“Sinead O´Connor” 1990. ©Deborah Feingold

The musicality on the portrait

Musicality is related to the beautiful, the aesthetic and the tangible of music, but it also refers to what is born inside, which is inherent to the musical person. Almost all good musicians, if we observe, carry that musicality in their person. Their posture, their way of walking, the expressions or the space they fill in. That musicality is what Deborah Feingold captures with her camera.

Although aware of the presence of the camera, the portrayed one appears playing, creating, negotiating his image with the photographer. Although the compositions are sometimes complex, naturalness is what always prevails, strangely, within these moments built to the millimeter. There is whaere we can see her experience, a photographer who knows how to prepare her canvas so that at the moment of shooting it is the improvisation that prevails, the ease, the fluidity of the moment and the encounter. And in this she behaves totally like a Jazz musician. Miles Davis (with whom Deborah had the opportunity to coincide) does not improvise on an empty open field, the king of the bebop, like his friend Coltrane or many others, improvise on a specific melody, once absorbed and assimilated. When they dominate it, is when they can put it together and disarm it innumerable times, undo it, dissect it and always return to it as if nothing had happened.
In the image exists a time factor that is irreversible, but that is what ends up creating a good photograph. That: it could not be half a second before or a half after. There is an exact moment that makes the photograph and that moment in the portrait is a moment of confluence between the photographer and the photographed, a supreme moment that is engraved on the plate and it is the result of all the ingredients that were carefully prepared for that image, added to the improvisation of the moment and united by an amalgam of time and magic that is the only thing that create an image as these are. Then, analysis will come with the years, the time, who have become the portrayed or if an image has become an icon or not, but, the important thing, the essential, was there dormant from the exact moment it was shot.

“Brian Eno” 1981. ©Deborah Feingold

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