Sean Rocha

Photographer Martin Klimas and the color of sound

The New York Times magazine this week profiles a fascinating new series of images by the German photographer Martin Klimas, who is best known for his flying birds and exploding figurines — you can see his past work on his (slow loading) website.  The new work takes every stoner heavy metal kid’s great discovery that stereo speakers generate palpable air vibrations when music is played really loud and marries it to Abstract Expressionism.  In Klimas’s case, he lays the speaker flat, covers it with a scrim, puts on a tune, and then pours paint onto the vibrating speaker while photographing the colors bouncing around using very fast shutter speeds.  The results (below) are spectacular — click on images to enlarge, then use the arrows to scroll through.

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Click here to see how entire movies can be compressed into a single color barcode revealing the mood of a film at a glance.  Or here to see another German photographer’s work capturing the light decay when old cathode-ray television sets are turned off.  Or here to see photographs of Tsarist Russia shot in color in 1911.  Or here for more early color, this time of the Great Depression.  Or here to see the modest young Englishwoman who was a pioneer of early-1960s sound technology and thus the unlikely face of DJ dance culture.

This entry was posted on Sunday, January 15th, 2012 at 12:04 pm. It is filed under That is Genius and tagged with art, Germany, music, photography, The New York Times. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed.