SIGHT UNSEEN catalog - California Museum of Photography ...

22
henry butler New orleANs
Henry Butler lives deep inside music, and,
as with most musicians, the delight is in
performance. He applies the same thinking
to photography. “My thing is taking the
photograph. I love to capture the image.
That feels good to me in the moment. Now,
I don’t always know exactly, literally what
I’ve captured…”
“What you have to know about Henry,”
says longtime assistant Andrea Duplessis,
“is that he’s an extreme intellect. When he
makes photographs, he reaches out with
that intellect and combines it with instinct
and intuition. His mind is what makes these
photographs. I once saw somebody tell
him, ‘You can’t know what red is because
you can’t see.’ He told them ‘I know what I
perceive the color red to be, and you’re in
exactly the same position.’”
Butler is a classically trained musician with
a percussive virtuoso piano style and eight
W.C. Handy blues award nominations. He
started playing keyboards at six and studied
at the Louisiana State School for the Blind.
Butler received formal music training at
Southern and Michigan State universities,
earning a Masters degree. A grant from the
National Endowment for the Arts allowed
him to study with keyboard players George
Duke, Cannonball Adderley’s Quintet,
and the late Sir Roland Hanna. Butler’s
early albums are jazz trio recordings
with top-flight instrumentalists Charlie
Haden, Billy Higgins, Ron Carter, and Jack
DeJohnette. Over the past decade, Butler
increasingly has returned to New Orleans
music and the blues.
Butler’s photography began in 1984 when
he sat for an extensive promotional photo
shoot. By the end of the session—labored
and seemingly eternal—he decided he could
do a better job behind the camera. He’s
been making photographs ever since. But
not much intimidates the
world-class musician with
the glaucoma clouded eyes
and wraparound shades.
“Shoot pool, throw darts?
I’ve tried both.”
As one might expect,
much of Butler’s street
photography is driven
by sound. In these
captured moments, we
see audio cues taken,
aural suggestions acted
upon. Butler tours and
shoots worldwide, but
many of the New Orleans
images are startlingly immediate portrayals
of his hometown’s distinctive denizens.
Off-center, vivid, and deliciously arbitrary,
the photographs also speak to Butler’s
gregarious, exploratory character.
As experimental as these images are, Butler
bases some of his photographic decisions on
his long-term study of the foreign country of
the sighted. Viewers need “what they call
‘composition,’” he says, “something in that
shot that gives them sort of a home base
so they can identify, and it makes it real
for them.”
Beyond that, Butler applies the ideas
inherent in his music—be open, embrace
variety, and experiment relentlessly. Then
trust that your audience will come forward
to meet you. “No two people will see
Key Bra
things in the exact same way. When I take a
photograph, it’s a great learning process for
me. Each person that describes it or looks
at it has a totally different way of seeing
it. People see colors differently; they see
different things in the same picture. They
interpret what they’re seeing based on their
own intellect.”