Press Release
Architecture in Music
Contact: Charles Brooks
Phone: +64 27 203 2269
Email: photos@charlesbrooks.info
Architecture in Music
Striking photos reveal the hidden details inside musical instruments. Photographer Charles Brooks unveils the beauty and complexity of these unseen spaces using specialist probe lenses and complex imaging techniques. Each photo is a blend of hundreds of frames. The unprecedented sharpness and detail renders these spaces as vast rooms, exposing the tool marks of the makers, repairs carried out through the centuries, and the hidden architecture within.
Charles chooses rare instruments with fascinating histories: A cello once hit by a train, a didgeridoo hollowed out by termites, an exquisite Fazioli grand piano hand-made from 11’000 individual parts. Each instrument is photographed hundreds of times with ever increasing focal lengths. These frames are then painstakingly blended together to form a single image. The clarity and carefully chosen perspectives trick the mind into believing the space is much larger than reality. A 240 year old cello looks like the inside of an ancient ship, a century old saxophone becomes a gaping tunnel of green and gold, the keys of a piano become a monolithic temple.
About the Artist
Charles was a cellist since childhood and had a career with some of the world's great orchestras before turning to photography full time in 2016. He was principal cellist with the Shenzhen & Guiyang Symphonies (China), the Orquestra de Camara de Valdivia (Chile), and spent three years with the Sao Paulo Symphony in Brazil. A Lumix ambassador, he is now based in Auckland, New Zealand, where he spends his time as a freelance photographer and indulges his other passion, astrophotography.
Media Attention
Architecture in Music has been one of the most published photographic series internationally since 2022. Charles’s photos are now in Museums worldwide, and have been reproduced more than 16 million times in many of the world’s largest newspapers and magazines. They have been featured by the most influential art and photography blogs worldwide, and are in commercial use by clients as diverse as the Paris Conservatorie and the CERN Hadron Collider.
In 2024 the series will have its first major international exhibition, running for six months at the Napa Valley Museum as part of the Napa Valley Festival, where the photos will be printed at a breathtaking room-size scale. Smaller exhibitions will also be held in Budapest and Stockholm, and Switzerland.
Quotes
- Daily Mail (UK): “A new stunning series of photos”
- Der Spiegel (Germany): “What looks like craters, art and bold buildings are instruments from the inside”
- My Modern Met: “Stunning Photos Reveal the Architectural Interiors Hidden Within Classical Instruments”
- NBC News (USA): “Striking Photos Reveal the Hidden Structures of Instruments”
- Classic FM (UK): “Artist’s striking photography reveals hidden depths of musical instruments”
Full Series Image Gallery:
Gallery – charlesbrooksphotography (architectureinmusic.com)
High resolution images for editorial use are available on request:
All Articles:
This series has received so much international attention that it's difficult to keep track. New articles appear every week in a multitude of languages. The following is a list of the articles and publications that the author is currently aware of:
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