Learning from Jacob Collier

Expressing feelings and a hierarchy of learning

“I think the process of trying to get inside them [emotions],
not necessarily to control or explain them, but just to get inside them,
is the most powerful thing I can do to be creative.”
- Jacob Collier

One of the challenges with photography, any art really, is being able to generate an emotional response to the work - perhaps the viewer feels what I felt standing in the landscape taking the photo, perhaps it is a whole different story the viewer creates based on their memories and experiences.

They say the teacher will arrive when the student is ready, and so it is with the great University of YouTube. In this newsletter, I reference two YouTube videos that involve music prodigy Jacob Collier (plus a bonus). While Jacob uses the language of music, I think the ideas are just as relevant for those of us interested in using a visual language.

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The photos in this newsletter are from a recent holiday near Bronte beach, Sydney, which are my first experiments with my action camera underwater. The idea, with due acknowledgement of Trent Parkes’ The Seventh Wave series, was to give the feeling of being at the beach, in the surf. A quintessential experience of summer in Australia.

Five levels of learning

In the first video (Jacob Collier Explains Music in 5 Levels of Difficulty ft. Herbie Hancock | WIRED here, 15 minutes), Jacob is asked to explain harmony to five different people – a child, a teen, a music college student, a professional musician and Herbie Hancock.

Not being a musician, I was soon well and truly out of my depth, although I enjoyed Jacob’s typical enthusiasm. What was most interesting, as highlighted in various comments, was the approach at each of the five levels.

1. Child: You know nothing, I'll tell you the basics.

2. Teen: You know nothing, but you have some life experiences, so I'll add a little context.

3. Student: You know the basics, so I'll demonstrate an advanced concept.

4. Professional: You know the objective concepts, so let's discuss the subjective ones as peers.

5. Master: Spoken word can no longer support our conversation.

In some areas of my photography, I am a child just enjoying playing and learning the basics (which is a lot of fun). And in some areas, I am much more focussed on exploring more complex ideas or feelings and trying to intentionally incorporate them in my work.

Regular readers will know that I am very deliberate in setting learning objectives as I progress along my photography journey. For a particular photographic genre or technique, what level am I at? What should I focus on to improve?

My aim is be able to articulate my understanding of key concepts at each level with the same clarity as Jacob talking about harmony. Here’s a challenge for any photographers - explain the exposure triangle at each of these 5 levels (disclaimer, I can’t).

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While I had a concept for these photos, I have limited experience with underwater photography. Given the chaotic nature of the surf, all I could do was just play, enjoy myself in the surf, take some photos and see what happens. Between each of the 3 sessions, I would review the images to see what seemed to work, refine my editing and have fun.

Verbalising emotions and feelings

As a nature photographer, I often want to give the viewer a sense of what it felt like to be there. These feelings can be relatively simple - happiness, joy, awe, for example. Who hasn’t felt the serenity in front of a grand vista in the soft light of blue hour?

Sometimes I want to communicate more complex feelings - such as fear, loss, divinity, disruption, reassurance, inevitability. These feelings are often influenced by cultural norms, memories, beliefs, and values, and are more difficult to present visually.

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For me, time at a surf beach involves total immersion in a shifting mass of water, sometimes benign and sometimes frightening. On a hot day, the sunlight is harsh and the water refreshing, the area between the flags is crowded with a mix of humanity, some competent, some out of their depth.

In the second video (Jacob Collier Plays the Same Song In 18 Increasingly Complex Emotions | WIRED here, 21 minutes), Jacob is asked to interpret the music Danny Boy on keyboard to reflect increasingly complex emotions. Starting with simple emotions like happy, sad, angry, mysterious, triumphant, serene, they become more abstract like frightened, betrayed, inevitability, guilt and forgiveness.

After each of three performances, Jacob explains his thought process and how he used his amazing musicality to express the emotion. While he was using the language of music, what was most interesting was how good Jacob was at describing the emotion. How can you create a feeling for the emotion if you can’t describe it? Even relatively straight forward emotions he described in wonderfully rich terms. I would encourage you to watch the video, but some examples.

• Happy – described as self-assured, joyous, bright, hopeful, and so he used major chords which are more consonant, more positive, more comfortable.

• Mysterious – used whole tone scale to create a sense of transparent wonder, a kind of strangeness; it’s about being suspended as if viewing from above, things are confusing.

• Guilt – used a sickening sort of weight in the chords, all slightly uncomfortable, laden, constantly shifting weight.

Sometimes I have listened to other, much more experienced photographers talk about an image. What I find fascinating is their ability to put into words what they are seeing, how shape, colour or composition add to (or detract from) how an image “feels”. Like the Jacob and Herbie conversation, some of the conversation may be beyond my comprehension, but it can be an exciting prospect to think of how far I have to go.

Becoming more literate about my feelings and articulating what I see in my work and that of others is an important skill I am working hard on.

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My mini challenge was to create a feeling of summer at the beach in a series of black and white images. Although the abstraction of black and white removes the bright colours of the beach and makes the water and sky dark, I hope the images convey a feeling of fun and play in the rough and tumble of the surf. I certainly had a lot of fun making them. I hope you enjoy them too.

Bonus inspiration

While on a musical theme, I have been going back to one song over this holiday period – Kasey Chamber’s remaking of Eminem’s Lose Yourself. This quote from the second video is relevant here.

“One of the greatest challenges and privileges of being a musician is the process of learning how to alchemise the forces in your life, to create with. You learn to transform them into something which has form, structure. Something which can be heard and understood, even believed, even by people who don’t experience the emotions that you’re drawing from in the same way as you.” - Jacob Collier

While the original is a great song, in some ways I think this version is even better. You can feel in the music Kasey’s lived experience growing up in a performing musical family; she certainly made it her own.

She takes us on an incredible emotional journey; starting quietly, the feelings are more of anguish and disappointment but these change through desparation to anger and untempered rage. There are some great reaction videos that explain some of the musical techniques used if you want to go down that rabbithole¹.

There is a moment when Kasey really ups the ante (you will know it when you hear it) and, as I come up for air following the New Year period, I am adopting these words as my inspiration for 2025:

No more games I’m a change what you call rage
Tear this mothafuckin’ roof off like 2 dogs caged
I was playin’ in the beginnin’ and the mood all changed
- Eminem

1. I would recommend these reaction videos: The Fairy Voice Mother (here) - “She is just a divinely feminine musical stick of dynamite” and Tim Welch Vocal Studios (here).