Face the Music

Richard Ehrlich was born in New York City and today resides in Los Angeles. Since 2001 his fine art photographs have been held in the permanent collections of numerous museums, including the Smithsonian National Museum of American History, Los Angeles County Museum of Art, UCLA Hammer Museum, The George Eastman House, Denver Art Museum, and Santa Barbara Museum of Art. Ehrlich was the first to photograph the Holocaust Archives in Bad Arolsen, Germany: the project is in the permanent collections of the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum, Yad Vashem in Jerusalem, The Jewish Museum New York, The Jewish Museum Berlin, and Musée d'art et histoire du Judaisme Paris, as well as others. He has participated in over thirty gallery shows, and his books include: The Forbidden Zone: Images from
Namibia and Anatomia Digitale and the recently published The Other Side of the Sky.

Can one capture, in photographic portraiture, the intense inner depth of emotion experienced while listening to music of one's choice? In 1872 Darwin published his seminal treatise The Expression of the Emotions in Man and Animals which
intersected with the dawn of photography. While the study of physiognomy has limited scientifi c validity, it nevertheless

provides the impetus for linking portraiture and emotion. If "the face is the window to one's soul," capturing the rhapsody of emotion through facial expression provides a unique window into each artist's inner being.

In this book, forty legendary musicians from a range of genres-including Quincy Jones, Ringo Starr, Herbie Hancock, Dave Brubeck, Wayne Shorter, Iggy Pop, Esperanza Spalding, Herb Alpert, Sir Graham Nash, Philip Glass, Jean-Yves Thibaudet, and Emmylou Harris-were photographed while listening to three pieces of music of their choice. (With only two exceptions, they chose music of other musicians rather than their own.) Music, painting and photography-indeed all art forms-share a common nexus for experiencing feeling, and are inextricably linked in contextualizing human emotion. Face the Music helps redefine the profound and transcendent influence music has on human emotion.