While a lot of my work has documented jazz, what I love about photographing musicians is capturing that moment of creation — it doesn’t matter what kind of music it is.
I’ve always subscribed to Duke Ellington’s philosophy that there are only two kinds of music — good, and the other kind.
Joseph Decosimo plays old-time Appalachian music, but he doesn’t treat it like a museum piece. For Joseph, the music is a living, breathing, constantly evolving thing — rooted in tradition, with a deep understanding of the past, but always edging it forward, bending without breaking it. That’s very much how I think about photography.
We met as neighbors when I moved to Durham. I heard the sound of his fiddle from across the street before we ever met. We became friends, and our collaboration began when I wanted to test a 19th-century magic lantern lens on my modern camera. That was three years ago, and since then I’ve been documenting his live performances, collaborations, and bands — watching both his music and my approach evolve as the project continues.
