Michael Wilson has been taking photographs of Nonesuch Records artists for 25 years, and of me for 15. Above, a portrait as a fresh New Yorker in 2009, included in a special compendium of 25 of Michael’s pictures Nonesuch has just published. I was honored to write the intro­duc­tory note. And here it is:

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Michael Wilson approaches a portrait session as a conver­sa­tion. His pictures become mementos of mutual trust between photog­ra­pher and subject. This ad hoc rela­tion­ship cannot be antic­i­pated or constructed in advance; it must be discov­ered through trial and error, impro­vi­sa­tion, and meeting halfway. Like with live perfor­mances, there’s a spon­tane­ity to the result. For those who know the music of the artists Michael has photographed for Nonesuch Records (drawn here from 67 projects begin­ning in 1998), the photographs suggest potent metaphors without forcing them, fusing sound-images with faces, musical compo­si­tions with visual ones. The rigorous struc­tures of Steve Reich’s music seem to manifest in the grid of a mono­lithic wall filling the frame, the composer’s iconic profile an accent in the lower corner. Audra McDonald’s musical story­telling seems to lead the viewer’s gaze down the wooded path behind her.

In the more formal portraits (Rhiannon Giddens, Ambrose Akin­musire, or Philip Glass) one feels the momen­tary atten­tion of a person­al­ity in a specific place, on a certain day. Such photo­graphic inten­sity would not be possible without craft—that is to say, working within the given constraints to find resource­ful solu­tions to the problems they impose. Michael’s default constraint is the square frame of his medium format Rolleiflex—the closest thing to a physical embod­i­ment of his mind’s eye, as he puts it. Within the square, he arranges subject and setting with a graphic artist’s sense of rhythm, visual echoes rebound­ing. The members of Kronos Quartet, backed into a corner but looking defiant, are crowned by the four cardinal direc­tions of a compass rose. Ry Cooder and Manuel Galbán are dwarfed by a monu­men­tal door, whose pattern of tele­scop­ing squares hangs above the two men like so many empty picture frames.

Michael is also never without a couple of 35mm cameras. He finds the format a bit more maneu­ver­able than the Rollei­flex, but also more inter­ven­tion­ist. He uses this mobility to draw images from a situ­a­tion when they don’t imme­di­ately present them­selves, and the result­ing photographs’ kinetic jour­nal­is­tic energy never detracts from their careful compo­si­tion. The infor­mal­ity lends itself to portraits of collab­o­ra­tion and friend­ship: The Black Keys look relaxed and shaggy, the parallel lines of the room slightly off-kilter, not unlike Patrick Carney’s glasses. Stephin Merritt and Lemony Snicket (face obscured by a hat) brandish fencing foils in opposite direc­tions, Merritt’s perfectly bisect­ing his eye. 

But even in their comic moments, Michael’s subjects maintain their self-posses­sion. You sense them, not the photog­ra­pher, telling you some­thing about them­selves. Likewise, the more candid, off-the-cuff pictures—Emmylou Harris in a cozy nook at the bar, or Frederic Rzewski relating an anecdote—portray a calm reserve even when they capture a scene or subject in motion. There’s a thought­ful­ness to these images, beyond the fact that many of their subjects appear lost in thought. It’s also diffi­cult to place them in time. While some have served as record covers or public­ity photos, they neither resort to flashy effects nor follow any styl­is­tic trends.

Lorraine Hunt Lieberson’s portrait, in which her sunlight-bathed face fills the frame diag­o­nally, gazing upward into the camera, stands apart. The direct­ness and close­ness of her eye contact are a physical mani­fes­ta­tion of her unaf­fected, emotion­ally honest singing. Brad Mehldau is the inverse, looking downward at his knees, almost disap­pear­ing into the dark backdrop. He’d rather be sitting at a piano, and even then, he’d probably have his eyes closed. Other portraits find the subject, or the photog­ra­pher, delib­er­ately obscur­ing their face. Bill Frisell sits in the rearmost plane, screened by the branches of a weeping willow, half the frame filled by an eager dog who bounds towards the camera, aping his grin. Randy Newman stands, back to the viewer, gazing upward at an avenue of Los Angeles palm trees, as though regard­ing slightly taller colleagues. The lower half of Jeremy Denk’s face hides behind his dogeared score of Ligeti’s Désordre, the fearsome notation in his hands speaking for him.

Michael has taken my photo­graph four times (“made pictures” is his preferred phrasing). The portrait here is from our first meeting, in 2009, two months after I’d moved to New York City. He hadn’t heard my music, and probably knew only that I was a young composer getting ready to release my debut record. This partic­u­lar photo­graph was never used for pack­ag­ing or promo­tion; it feels too personal. But it’s a compo­si­tional master­class, a series of yin-yangs and echoes: the light cast by a half-func­tion­ing wall sconce mirrors the splay of my legs, both diag­o­nals breaking up the vertical of the window moldings, which are them­selves broken into bold stripes of bright and shadow.

Michael’s manner and personal appear­ance are almost subver­sively humble; only the speed with which he moves betrays his confi­dence. For a while, he drove a pickup truck so battered that I recall being able to see the road through holes in the floor. Once, I sat amidst goats and chickens in his cold Cincin­nati backyard for an ambrotype, a “wet plate” exposure made on glass that he devel­oped in his basement darkroom. On another occasion, he suggested we meet at a derelict funeral parlor he knew. During our sessions over the years, I’ve made a point to take a few pictures of the artist as he goes about his work. These iPhone portraits capture his antic presence, bobbing and weaving around the scene, juggling cameras, putting his eyes in a hundred differ­ent places, as he draws pictures out of the surround­ings, trying—as Michael puts it—to find the light.