Jacob Johnson Captures Music in Black and White Images

Backstage at a Fort Worth live performance corridor, earlier than a single observe reaches the viewers, DFW-native Jacob Johnson is already listening. He’s watching fingers hover over strings, faces settle into focus, devices ready to talk. Instead of reaching for his personal instrument, Johnson raises a digicam to seize the second when music exists all over the place besides within the air.

Those quiet, charged moments type the spine of “Songs Without Words,” a multidisciplinary mission that earned Johnson grants from the Greater Denton Arts Council and the City of Lewisville. The funding helps his first solo images exhibition, a companion photobook, and a brand new EP for classical guitar — three interlocking items that discover how music might be skilled visually, even in silence.

Shot virtually completely in black-and-white, the pictures give attention to candid backstage encounters with musicians simply earlier than they carry out. Instruments relaxation in opposition to chairs, fingers take a look at the strings, and darkish shadows point out which sound is being introduced. “In this context, as a musician,” Johnson explains, “most of my opportunities to take unique photographs, things that not everybody gets to see, are backstage.” The pictures aren’t meant to doc celebrities a lot as ambiance—the suspended second earlier than sound.

That entry is hard-earned. Over the previous two years, Johnson has photographed an unlikely roll name of world-class guitarists passing by the DFW space, together with Grammy winner David Russell, Andy McKee, Manuel Barrueco, Marko Topchii, Andrea Gonzalez Caballero, plus extra, usually throughout live shows introduced by the Allegro Guitar Society. Rather than chasing spectacle, Johnson appears for resonance. “It’s a mix of portraits of musicians and explicitly musical photographs,” he says, “along with photos that aren’t explicitly musical, but might have a unique rhythm or timbre. Those are things we can pick up on visually as well.”

The scope of “Songs Without Words” displays a behavior Johnson has cultivated over a lifetime — mixing pursuits till they’re inseparable. “Really, anything that I become interested in,” he says, “I have a history of trying to mix my interests.”

Music got here first. Johnson started piano classes at age 4, switched to trumpet in elementary faculty, and finally gained early recognition as a soloist with the Wind Symphony of the Greater Dallas Youth Orchestra after profitable its concerto competitors. He entered faculty as a trumpet efficiency main, however one hallway encounter modified the whole lot. “I heard a student practicing the guitar,” Johnson remembers. “They were playing something with several melodies happening at the same time. I’d heard that on recordings, but I’d never seen somebody do it in person. And I was like, ‘I need to learn to do that.’”

The classical guitar supplied independence and portability. “A classical guitar can accompany you to the top of a mountain,” he says. “If you play the piano, good luck.” He left the trumpet division and dedicated absolutely to strings, finally increasing backward in time to the lute. That resolution, too, was pushed by sound, or quite, authenticity. 

“I was looking at this 16^th-century music and thinking it can’t sound the same on a modern instrument. It just can’t,” Johnson says relating to why he selected the lute. 

His curiosity has taken him far afield, with performances on the Collegiate Peaks Guitar Retreat in Colorado, for the Utah and Sacramento Guitar Societies, and at Lute Society of America LuteFest West, whereas remaining rooted in North Texas. Along the best way, he has taught privately, composed and organized music, revealed essays, and labored with nonprofit arts organizations. That final expertise led him again to high school for a graduate diploma in arts group administration. “Artists don’t tend to have a lot of business training,” Johnson says. “And so these arts organizations, they tend to struggle because of that.”

Photography entered the image virtually unintentionally. After finishing his debut album, “The Ghosts of Dawn,” launched June 21, 2023, Johnson was exhausted. The album, which options “Astrolabe,” a set written for him by Dallas composer Eddie Healy and impressed by a medieval astronomical calculator, had consumed greater than a yr of targeted work. “I needed some kind of a creative outlet that wasn’t musical,” he says. “And I found my grandmother’s old Kodak Brownie camera, and I took it out just to have some fun.”

What started as decompression turned obsession. Johnson began creating his personal movie, partly out of necessity and partly uncontrolled. “Especially the one-hour photo places,” he says, “you don’t even get your negatives back. The people developing it have very little actual experience. They’re not out shooting film themselves.” Building a darkroom was inevitable. “Watching an image come out after you have a blank page,” he says, “there’s something really special about that.”

“Songs Without Words” grew organically from years of carrying a digicam all over the place. “I wasn’t initially thinking of a project,” Johnson admits. “It was just something I had fun with. After a while, I realized I had so much that was musically related that maybe I could do something around that.” The title, borrowed from the Nineteenth-century musical type popularized by Mendelssohn, felt inevitable.

Johnson hopes to pair the exhibition with reside efficiency, pictures on the wall, music within the air, and dialog in between. “Ideally, I’d like to have an exhibition and play the music too,” he says. “Play about twenty minutes of music and just hang out and chat. If people have questions about photography or music, it’s nice to interact.”

Johnson’s solo exhibition will run on the Lewisville Grand Theater from July 18 by August 15, 2026.