Orchestra Hall in the Fall, Cold

The seed was just a feeling — violins filling the room like weather instead of earbuds. I couldn’t stop thinking about sound as atmosphere, the way a concert hall turns music into something you move through instead of something that arrives through your ears. I wanted to see that. Digital gave me the mist, the amber haze rolling between empty seats, because I needed to control how dense it gets, how it pools in the corners where the autumn light doesn’t reach. Real photography of an empty hall would look abandoned. I needed it to look like sound still lives there.

I’m not sure the conductor’s perspective is the right one. It isolates the viewer — you’re behind the podium, watching nothing happen, and the beauty of that is also kind of lonely. That’s maybe the tension I’m sitting with. The hall is full of music and empty of people, and I keep returning to whether that balance is about presence or absence, or if I’m just chasing a specific quiet I can’t name.