Ron Saint Germain, Sebastiao Salgado and the Music Business.

Ron Saint Germain is a rock music legend. He has produced, mixed, or engineered 60 Gold and Platinum albums including four “Diamond Platinum" (10 million +) awards with sales on the better side of a quarter of a billion units. His albums have garnered 18 Grammy nominations with 12 being winners. With 35+ years in music under his belt he has worked with the likes of 311, Muse, Tool, Bad Brains, Breed 77, Mos Def, Living Color, U2, Red Hot Chili Pepers, Soundgarden, The Cure, Creed, Sonic Youth, Kraftwerk, The Cult, Killing Joke, Adam Ant, Lou Reed, Keziah Jones, Kashmir, and many more. I have had the opportunity to work with and befriend Ron Saint Germain and watched his mastery of production and engineering at work. Ron is an audiophile, his ear and attention to the details of music arrangement isn't matched by many, however Ron has a problem. His problem is that he is a master of the process of making music in a time in the music business when the process is no longer very valuable.  You see you will find Ron bragging about the Neve 9098i that he just moved into his basement, or you will hear him describing the DBA scale and the wave vector differences of digital and tape recording. The majority of music consumers listen to MP3 files on iPod headphones. These files are so compressed that only the most genius of audiophiles could possible tell the difference between a recording on the 9098i that costs $150,000 or a protools based home studio set up that has a good mic or preamp compressor. It seems easy to gather that Ron Saint Germain could and maybe should become a dinasour in todays music market. Making music is so much easier than it used to be and many people have access to the technology to make professional sounding music. The problem is this, Ron Saint Germain knows what the hell he is doing and they guy who makes beats on Fruity Loops doesn't . He knows how to tune a guitar for a certain effect and which guitar amp to run it through. He knows how the guitars should be arranged for the highest emotional effect for the song and so that it uplifts instead of clashing with the tone of the singers voice. He knows how to mic the drums to either give you a tight hip hop sound or a roomy Led Zepplin sound depending on what the tune needs. he knows how to arrange vocal performances around musical performances. This is the most simple explanation of his very skilled, very nuanced process that allows him to make great music. The greatness isn't always obvious, it's etherial. Somehow the soul can hear a deep process and for those of us who still love music and recognize it as art, the process is appreciated. 

Sebastiao Salgado is a master photographer from Brazil. He began his professional career as an economist, but after taking pictures on a business trip to Africa he realized that he had found his real passion and talent. Sebastiao's approach to photography is all about process. First of all he (still) shoots film on a Leica 35mm camera and uses a small selection of wide angle lenses. the film that he primarily shoots in a 3500ASA (super fast, super grainy) film that allows him to shoot at pretty much any light level without the use of intrusive flash bulbs. I once read in an interview with Salgado that will visit town or community that he is documenting and live with the people for 30 or 40 days before he starts photography. He likes to become invisible and get very close to his subjects (remember he primarily uses wide angle lenses). He also said in that interview that his photographs are not taken but given to him from his subjects. He rates his 3500 ASA film at 1600 and sometimes 800. In his minds eye he knows what he is trying to achieve in terms of grain structure and depth of field in the negatives that he will receive from the lab weeks after he has shot the images. For Salgado, his film choice, the way he rates it, the lenses that camera that he chooses and the way he interacts with his subjects is a part of his process. Of course Salgado has an incredible eye; but that's only a part of how he creates the outcome of the images that he makes. We must also keep in mind that shooting film limits him to 36 shots per roll on 35mm film. The Leica is a manual focus and manual shutter camera. He has to be selective with what he shoots and he can't roll off 35 shots at the press of a button like you can with digital photography. He doesn't have the luxury of seeing what he has just shot instantly so that he can adjust composition or camera settings; all of that has to be done in his mind. When I was getting my MFA and I was reviewing his work for the first time I used to be baffled at how he was able to make his images look and feel like that. He was a magician to me and no other photographer that I have studied made images quite like his...maybe just as great but not like. He had a signature style that was nearly impossible to reproduce. There is magic in his process. The other day I dusted my Mamiya 7 range finder camera and took in on the road with me. I was contemplating selling all of my film cameras and buying a new digital. After a day of shooting, and guessing the right exposures and being very selective of what I chose to shoot (the Mamiya 7 is a medium format camera which only shoots about 11 exposures per roll) I realized that I enjoyed that process. I can't wait to see the negatives of what I shot, and get into the dark room to interpret them in the print. Now, the film process is ridiculously expensive and isn't really practical anymore, unless you are Sabastiao Salgado and can sell an original print for $10,000, or you are a famous advertisement photographer who has the luxury of huge shooting budgets. Art is never practical. The process that it takes to make great art is always intricate, involved, and time consuming. 

Art contributes to the beauty of the world, it makes living, worth living. I am not bitter; I understand that times change and I am young, but I realize the difference between something that is art and something that is not. I believe that other people do too. I believe that the painstaking process of experiencing something great from someone who has perfected his/her craft is still valuable to people even if they don't realize it in theory. There is an etherial recognition of beauty and greatness. Maybe since the music business can no longer pedal it's wears, it will have to revert back to the days creative great music and sell more of less. Then maybe Ron Saint Germain will get called for work again.