Wendel Wirth: Grüv

The recording of sound began in 1857, when Édouard-Léon Scott de Martinville’s curiosity led him to create an image of sound waves. To capture these vibrations, he covered a sheet of paper with a fine layer of soot and moved it under a stylus. The result was a fine, wavy trail that one might consider a fingerprint of sound. Some twenty years later, Thomas Edison wondered if the grooves, created by vibrations, carried the potential to play back the same sound that originally etched their path. Much to his surprise, the reciprocal was an exact match and the reproduction of sound was born.

My lifelong devotion to blues and classic rock music led me to photograph nearly two hundred albums. I was curious about the physicality of the vinyl and set out to explore its ‘audio fingerprints’. I found that the grooves, captured by the camera, formed seemingly three dimensional, subtle undulations showcasing the beauty and complexity of music. Human elements surfaced; scratches, dust, and fingerprints, encouraging memories surrounding the tactile experience of vinyl. Inscribed signatures and markings appeared, some, a symbol of pride, left by the artists in the record pressing industry. Others, a pressings documentation of time and place. Thoughtfully curated color blocks, chosen to compliment both sound and history, cover the center labels in hopes of directing ones attention to these subtleties.

Grüv is a conceptual project intent on blurring the line between photography and minimalist art. It was photographed with a 150MP technical camera and is presented as individual albums (two photographs - side a+b - 17” square), sub-collections of 17” photographs of various quantities (i.e. - grateful dead studio albums/13 albums/26 photographs) and as select individual albums - 60” square.