I'm finding this project hard. It's not coming off very well. Things are not coming together. Whatever I try doesn't really work or fall into place. The improvisation on a theme is off key. I'm just going to have to practice more. Thank heavens for digital technology. It allows me afford to make mistakes.
Music is a good way to understand the photographic process. So we have composition, tonality improvisation, motion, rhythm, interpretation as well as light and colour.
This places an emphasis on the interpretation of a score or theme as distinct from originality, genius and masterworks of the modernist tradition that placed on photography as an artistic medium, which has specific properties and representational problematics. Once art was liberated from representation (realism) it had to justify its existence as the search for its own essence.
Formalist modernism held that each art medium must determine, through rigorous self-examination of its own operations and effects, those specific qualities unique to itself. Hence the modernist reading of an image that rejects context and meaning and places an emphasis on purity, the self-sufficiency of the photograph, and photography's inherent nature as a medium. We end up with disembodied self-closure of pure visuality.
Improvisation not coming together brings the idea of formless into play---the improvisation goes no where. It just winds down and becomes disorder.