Eigenface’s latest release, “Slow Exposure,” offers a different view of photography. It looks at old photographs and at photography as an art form and the way an image can affect how people understand the past. The song, written by bassist/vocalist Elliot Vaughan, is about how a photograph can be taken out of time and used as evidence, memory, or even truth.
It’s a playful, propulsive lyric that touches on ideas of portraiture, perception, objectivity, and interpretation. to the picture It’s a deliver lyric. Got another picture given to me, but I wasn’t there to believe. What can a picture tell someone who’s not there? That is the crux of the track’s question.
One piece, “Slow Exposure,” asks that question and meditates on the curious relationship between the moment arrested and the beholder looking back at it: a photograph can preserve a moment in time, but the meaning of the photograph is always negotiable. The song for Eigenface is a way to think about the effect of images on memory and the ease with which an image can be linked to ideas of truth.
