If aerial photographs could reveal energy the way infrared photographs reveal heat, Memphis would be surrounded by vectors pointing toward it, saying, “This is the place!”
Walk the Memphis streets and you are engulfed by the ages of music. You hear long-gone songs, spilling from deserted and hollow alcoves of old buildings. Tune your antennae. The rumble of the jug hits your gut, the trumpet’s crescendo makes your feet move, and the washtub’s rope pulls you into trouble.
It’s easy to come to Memphis and only see donut shops and churches, with gas-guzzling automobiles passing by, defecating on Chickasaw holy grounds. Worms slither out of the grass after a freshly fallen rain, bake on the Dutch-Oven sidewalks, and crunch under your feet. It’s a hellhole, wrapped in swaths of freshly-laid plastic — Nineveh in waiting.
Look at Christian Patterson’s photographs. Listen to them. Trees sing. A red fire hydrant holds a piercing note while a verse descends. We hit the song’s bridge and ascend steps to a blue sky of hope, of possible liberation from the weight of the world.
The gas burners of a stove emit blue heat. It’s another song’s full-force start, the roundhouse opening of “I’ll Take You There.” Revelation! We’re going down, down, down into a fiery lake of burning sulfur. The volume, like the flame, is all the way up.
A fluorescent tube is a chord – red, blue, yellow and green. Four notes, one sound, a reverberating, transfixing light. Hold the keys Mr. Organ Player; hold that piercing high note Reverend Green! The sound throbs and beats like a heart, again and again. It trails off into the darkness. We see what can’t be seen.
Memphis! Memphis! You betray us with your missteps. You lie; you make false promises. But we do not despair. We recognize the necessity of your civic stupidity. Decades of soul-baring music have accumulated, nearly a century now, always in spite of you, always reacting to your awfulness. You stoke the rage; you fuel the engines of fury.
Fuck you Memphis, you and all you stand for! Live on, engage and enrage us. Sing your song so we can sing along.
– Robert Gordon, introduction to Sound Affects
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Christian Patterson does not deny his photographic background: In the years 2002 to 2005 he worked with William Eggleston. It was during this important education – he never visited any photography school – that his pictures of Memphis, Tennessee were produced.
Sound Affects, as the title suggests, takes us to places where music was made and listened to or can still be heard, and also includes scenarios whose sounds are not based on direct, physical connections to music’s production and place. And so these pictures are not just an explicit documentation of the music-laden culture of Memphis. They are not merely illustrative; their quality lies in creating atmosphere. Therefore, light itself plays a very decisive role. Patterson expresses his interest in color and light with virtually synesthetic ability; his knack for portraying the qualities of sound through color and light is fascinating.
Patterson has a keen sense for places. He does not stage his scenes. He mostly uses natural light and captures his subjects from a first-person perspective, sometimes viewed from below, sometimes radically cutting off his subjects. He also has an interest in confusing, sometimes amusing details and references which only become more apparent at second sight or through the combination and sequencing of his images. The courageous cutting of the subject of a picture reminds one of photographic evidence, like a detective taking notes at the scene of a crime – Patterson’s look under the covers is perhaps most defined in the image titled “Sound Affects,” with its hyper-real colors connecting Patterson’s interests with those of his friend from Memphis. But the themes of Patterson’s work are his own.
– Kerstin Stremmel, Camera Austria, June 2008