Outpost Mâvarin: Silence

Saturday, July 11, 2009

Round Robin: Silenced

This week's Round Robin topic is "Silence," as suggested by Monica of Shutterly Happy. It's tricky to depict an auditory experience in a visual medium, let alone the lack of sound, and for a long time I had no clue how to handle it. My eventual solution was to photograph something that clearly produced sound in the past, but has now clearly been silenced. Here we go!

From Round Robin Photo Challenges

The pictures above decorate the former upper-story windows of the venerable Chicago Music Store (founded 1919) in downtown Tucson. I'm honestly not sure whether the guy with the guitar is supposed to depict Jerry Garcia or someone else (Willie Nelson?), but the person in the next window over is Jimi Hendrix, whose music was silenced decades ago. Yes, we can still hear it, but not coming from him - and certainly not coming from that painted window!

Same story with Janis Joplin at the other end. And although two of the Beatles are still alive, their collective voice as a group was silenced in 1970, breaking through again only briefly when Anthology came out.

I've written a couple of times this week about a power failure we had on Tuesday, which drove me out of the silent house. On Friday evening the power went out again! One second Rachel Maddow was coming on - the next, the tv screen went dark and silent, and so did the air conditioner above the tv to the right.

This time the power was only off for a few minutes, but the noise of our electric appliances didn't exactly roar into life right away. When I turned the tv back on, I had to turn on the cable box too. It promptly displayed this screen, silently, until I fiddled with it to try to get an actual station again.

I may be able to come up with something more, later today, but that will have to do for now. Meanwhile, have a look at everyone else's silent photos!

Linking List