Concert for Photographers at Centro de la Imagen

Concert for Photographers was always an act of resistence and its current reincarnation is no exception. In 1985 the group Música de Cámara, made up by the late Angel Cosmos, Juan José Díaz Infante and Arturo Márquez, accompanied by a dozen photographers, performed Concert for Photographers. Thirty plus years later this historical milestone in performance art and photography was re-enacted at the Centro de la Imagen, México City. In the 1985 original, the "musicians" appeared on stage with their instruments (photographic cameras, motor-drives, electronic flashes) and the concert started—with the clics of the shutters, the turning of the motor drives, the chirping of the electronic flashes as they recharged, and the roaring of the synthesizer—as the audience heard chords more like John Cage than Philip Glass. Angel Cosmos himself understood that this work was evidence of the advent of new technologies (video, synthesizer) in the visual arts. That future is already past and it has posthumously ratified Cosmos. Juan José Diaz Infante, on the other hand, foresaw the integration of photography, music, and video—a mix that later became known as "multimedia." Concert for Photographers explores two aspects of the photographic act that almost always go together with it: it is noisy, and its noise (the music) is produced by the cameras (the instruments) operated by the photographers (the musicians), and its sheer presence. The noise of the photographic act is undetectable when the viewer simply views a photographic image. Even if we opt for a literal interpretation of "noise," photographers used to understand that the advantage of a Leica, an Hexar, or a digital camera is that they were cameras with a silencer. Upon shooting them, the photographed subjects might not even find out they had been photographed. Without the silencer, the sound of the camera prepares gestures, turns head, and hides actions; in other words, it changes the world. But the most important interpretation of "noise" is figurative. The sheer presence of a person armed with a photographic machine is "noisy" —even before releasing the shutter. That noisy presence calls attention to itself and predisposes people involved in the photographic act, positively or negatively. The unavoidable photographic noise changes the world in such a way that whoever practices photography in the documentary mode faces the impossibility of making a recording that is both noisy and objective. The second aspect of this piece by Música de Cámara is precisely the camera; that is, the chamber. Concert for Photographers takes place in an environment appropriate for chamber music; that is, a chamber—figuratively speaking—a "camera obscura"—inasmuch its fundamental aspects are not made explicit; i.e., enlightened or clarified. The camera qua chamber is the central metaphor of the group's poetics. Although the photographic camera is part of a mechanism to obtain images, its simplicity hides the intentionality of its design and the type of images it produces. Optical, chemical and geometric processes have been refined in order to satisfy a way of looking at the world. The furnishings of the dark chamber of our mind structure the world. The unrepeatable score that the group Música de Cámara followed in 1985, in order to produce the melodies of Concierto para Fotógrafos, we understand today as a critique of pure photography, and we illustrate it faithfully with impure photographic records.