That introduction fed directly into the modal approach Miles was already developing, replacing chord changes with scales. He wrote ‘Blue in Green’ under real pressure, alone, working out the same six bars over and over until three in the morning at a friend’s apartment. He later compared jazz improvisation to Japanese brush painting — draw too heavily and the ink breaks through the parchment; there’s no going back. Davis later said of him, simply, ‘He plays the piano the way it should be played.’

I was a jazz musician once, and jazz is still my musical center. But that center formed inside the popular music of the 1970s and ’80s — the world I came of age in — as I moved toward jazz and the artists it influenced. My musical tastes are decidedly eclectic.

Sting, an important musical figure to me, writes and performs with real jazz instincts — he has spent a career seeking out and working with players who have serious jazz chops, Branford Marsalis and Dominic Miller among them, because he hears what they hear.

Players are often associated with one genre or another, but the truly skilled can change styles like chameleons. Jimmy Page spent years as a session musician before Led Zeppelin ever existed, moving across pop, folk, blues, and film work with the same ear he later brought to rock’s loudest possible version of itself. David Sanborn and Donald Fagen prove the same range exists in more commercially polished territory.

In July 2003, at the Jazz Baltica Festival in Salzau, Germany, Michael Brecker and Pat Metheny and a small ensemble performed Sting’s “Fragile.” It is on YouTube. Watch it once and you will understand why I am not exaggerating when I say it was a you-cannot-move-from-your-chair performance. Nils Landgren’s vocal was haunting. Brecker played with every register he had — harmonic, technical, introspective — and there was not a weak link anywhere in the band. Sting’s idea reimagined in performance.

A few years before that, I heard Bruce Springsteen play a song that was never his. Sometime around 1982 or 1983, in Chicago, in the middle of a set built from “Born to Run,” “Tenth Avenue Freeze-Out,” and “Rosalita,” the band covered Tom Waits’s “Jersey Girl.” I knew the Waits original. This wasn’t homage. This was function — a quiet, well-chosen breath in a very long show, giving the band a rest and the set somewhere to build back up from. He could have used one of his own songs. He used this one because it fit his voice, and because a Jersey guy singing “Jersey Girl” meant something the room understood without being told. The juxtaposition resonated.

Tom Waits opens the door to photography. He is a master of reinvention, the way Miles was, the way Sting still is. He has moved from barroom piano ballads to junkyard percussion experiments to film scores to avant-garde theater. A strong catalog throughout. His stories are theatrical poetry set to music more than songs in the conventional sense — each one inhabited rather than performed.

His voice is the instrument most people notice first and the one that takes longest to understand. Gravelly, ruined-sounding, off-putting to plenty of listeners on first contact. But the wreckage is the point. A cleaner voice would underserve every character he writes — the drunks, the loners, the men talking to themselves at 3 a.m. — and be devoid of the hard luck, heartbreak, tragedy, and loss they lived. He crosses the threshold through brokenness.

Brokenness is what Susan Burnstine builds into her cameras, hand-altered, rebuilt, and unconventional. They serve her intention — to depict the subjective reality of remembered dreams and emotions over literal, objective reality. In her skilled hands, they produce dark ambiguity and introspection — like we are seeing the image as projected into the artist’s mind rather than the result of it being captured on the camera’s image plane. Her photographs carry exactly the same kind of truth Waits’s songs do: real because of their flaws, not despite them.

Resonance, like music, has a dynamic range — pianissimo to fortissimo, barely perceptible to overwhelming. Fortissimo for me? Burnstine and Waits. They resonate strongly with me and evoke similar things. Stieglitz called this equivalence: the conviction that a photograph could carry the same abstract, musical power as a piece of music, with no literal subject required to carry it. When I encounter one my mind expands the field on its own and invokes the other.

This combination is specific to me. Your version may involve two entirely different artists — maybe a film and a building, a smell and a song, anything. Particulars aren’t the point — intensity is. Resonance manifested, not just recognized. Involuntary, cross-wired, one always summoning the other. Trust follows resonance at every level.

David Sanborn crossed the threshold with his versatility, moving between blues, jazz, pop, fusion, and soul with skill, ease, and high production values — recognizable as the alto soloist within a few notes, on his own records and on those of other people, like David Bowie, Eric Clapton, Chaka Khan, Steely Dan, and Bruce Springsteen. He once played a strange, unresolved note during a recorded set at the Village Vanguard, and Miles Davis happened to be listening to the tape the next day at Gil Evans’s house. Sanborn cringed. Davis just said, ‘You should have played it twice.’ For Miles, there were no mistakes — only opportunities not yet taken twice. Sanborn’s Night Music late-night talk show during the late 1980s was a veritable who’s who in jazz, blues, and fusion music. Many of these episodes are available on YouTube.

Sanborn and Michael Brecker first met as teenagers at the Stan Kenton Jazz Camp, two fifteen-year-olds already chasing the same idea — bebop fused with soul. Years later, they became two-thirds of the original Brecker Brothers’ three-horn lineup, alongside Randy Brecker on trumpet. When Michael died in 2007, Sanborn and Randy eventually reunited the surviving horns for a new project, with Randy’s wife taking his late brother’s place. Some bonds outlast the people who started them.

Donald Fagen crosses it through hyper-engineered studio polish, built the slow way: a writer who knew exactly who to bring in, often through long and expensive sessions. Then, like a potter, molded what they played until it became The Nightfly (Aja and Gaucho are other examples), with thirty-one musicians cycling through the sessions until each part was right. Guitarist Dean Parks, who played on The Nightfly, said Fagen wasn’t chasing perfection — he wanted something worth hearing again and again, which he achieved. The Nightfly was for years, and still is, often used to evaluate and fine-tune sound systems. Every note is calculated, every sound considered, and none of it costs the music an ounce of feeling.

Different paths to the same threshold. There is no secret or special formula — soul is the requirement, and which path leads there doesn’t matter. Photography is no different.

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Ray K. Metzker and Susan Burnstine work from opposite directions. While Burnstine alters the instrument, Metzker alters nothing but his eye — and that eye wasn’t casually acquired. He trained at Chicago’s Institute of Design, the direct American inheritor of the Bauhaus, under Harry Callahan and Aaron Siskind. The Bauhaus treated photography as a formal discipline first — light, shape, and tonal value as the actual subject, representation as incidental. Metzker absorbed that discipline completely.

Early Philadelphia, 1963 (63 HD 32), from Light Lines — one of his many studies of wet and dry pavement, the wet rendered nearly pure white, the dry nearly black — registers first as pure abstraction. The comprehension lands before you’ve identified what you’re looking at. Only afterward does the mind go to work and find the pavement, the curb, the specific street still present in the print.

No broken lens. No compromised optics. Just an eye trained rigorously enough to find the formal event hiding inside the literal one — the same way Bill Evans plays with abstraction on Waltz for Debby, extending harmonies, inverting chords, omitting bass notes, and invoking impressionism through parallel thirds and sixths.

Michael Kenna’s Ratcliffe Power Station works through reduction instead of construction. Plate 17, Study 15, 1985 is shot from among the cooling towers themselves — two filling most of the right half of the frame, a third on the left. The two on the right are rendered in careful gradation, one nearly black, the other just light enough to read as separate from it. Long exposure turns the steam between them into a soft, sustained band that holds the eye in place long enough to find the nearly pure white V opening between the towers, the surrounding landscape reduced to the faintest suggestion of itself. Nothing here is added. Almost everything has been taken away, and what remains does more work than addition ever could — in much the same way one well-placed note by Miles spoke volumes.

Every image in John Sexton’s Quiet Light warrants the time spent looking at it. Every last one. Plate 47, Dunes, Afternoon, Death Valley National Monument, California, 1983, is one example among many. Ten distinct layers of dune recede through the frame, each one holding its own pattern, its own exposure, its own particular fall of light. Behind them, the sky carries only the faintest hint of cloud texture, just enough to avoid competing with the exquisite micro-contrast in the sand. Sexton served as an assistant to Ansel Adams, which is partly where this kind of overwhelming technical and artistic mastery came from. Michael Brecker matched that mastery in his medium. What makes the work of these two men so special — Sexton on film, Brecker on saxophone — is that alongside their undisputed technical mastery is the ability to project deep emotional power.

Gordon Parks was hired in 1944 to photograph the Penola Grease Plant for Standard Oil of New Jersey — a company still working to repair its public image after the 1911 trust breakup, made worse by wartime allegations of ties to German industrial interests. The commission went through Roy Stryker, who had run the Farm Security Administration’s photographic unit, where Parks himself had worked. FSA photography had been politically useful to Roosevelt, but it was also undeniably humane, capturing Depression-era hardship with real dignity. Hiring Stryker, who in turn brought in Parks, was not an accident. It was an attempt to bring that same humanist eye into a corporate assignment.

Parks wrote to Stryker in March 1944, describing it as ‘a pretty nasty job’ — grease underfoot on floors, dark buildings, lighting equipment that needed an hour or more of cleaning daily, and dangerous open pans of hot grease cooling on the floor. Pittsburgh Grease Plant, 1944/1946 finds dignity and respect in the people doing that work anyway — the machinery, the processes, the product itself treated as more than backdrop. Page 45, captioned “The cooper’s room where the large drums and containers are reconditioned. Here a workman lifts a drum from a boiling lye solution which has cleaned from it grease and dust particles,” is one example. Parks used a complex lighting setup on this image, positioning multiple lights to bring out the texture in the man’s apron and give the image real depth. The result runs high in contrast, not by design so much as necessity, and the contrast deepens the drama and the humanity rather than working against it.

Sting occupies this territory too — The Soul Cages, inspired by his father’s life as a shipyard riveter in Newcastle, mourns a trade and a town along with the man himself. By extension, it becomes an elegy for a vanishing industrial world, an unglamorous trade given the same dignity Parks gave a grease plant. The respect and reverence are palpable.

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How does it make you feel? Was the artist’s intention realized? Does it draw me back? None of these are rhetorical. They’re the actual questions, asked every time. The more art you consume — and the more you make — the more automatic and unconscious the asking becomes, until the questions and the answers arrive together, indistinguishable, unbidden, in your gut.

Some answer themselves instantly. Others take real work — sitting with a piece, working through what was technically attempted, what idea was in play, where it sits in its medium, until intention and execution come into focus together. That slower arrival is resonance too. Respect, earned through effort, is not a consolation prize for the absence of an instant reaction. It’s a different door to the same room.

I rarely serve as a juror in photography exhibitions. My schedule and potential conflicts of interest are real reasons, and they’re the ones I give. The rub is this: I can score competently against the standard metrics — composition, technical execution, conceptual coherence — I know how to weigh them like anyone trained to. But resonance matters too. So does lack of resonance. Resonance — my gut — is my guide.

Introducing the gut into a jury room creates havoc. The objective is to fairly recognize the strongest work, and that objective cries out for rubrics — composition, technical execution, conceptual coherence, all of it measurable, all of it fair in the way a scoring system is supposed to be fair. I understand the need completely.

The trouble is that the photography I believe to be strongest doesn’t always survive that measurement. As an exhibition chair, I’ve come to believe the best juries mix three perspectives: people who think in craft rubrics, people who come from art history or the gallery side and carry their own different rubrics, and successful practitioners — people who have actually made strong work themselves, under real conditions, and bring that hard-won knowledge into the room as its own form of authority.

These are rarely three separate people in three separate chairs. The strongest jurors usually carry more than one of these perspectives at once. Neither craft nor criticism nor practice is ignorant of what the others value. Generally there is a good discussion and a meeting of the minds.

What makes the room work is when the gut gets an advocate, whatever combination of experience that advocate brings with them, and the panel has to be willing to actually consider what that advocate is saying, rather than treating it as noise the rubric should have caught.

The arts are interrelated and intertwined with history. The highest achievement of any medium is artistic intention and realization leading to comprehension without the need for analysis. Engagement to the point of resonance is not a bonus. It’s the whole point. Everything else — the rubric, the training, the technique — are supporting cast, not replacements.

Stieglitz himself drew parallels between music and photography, decades before anyone needed convincing that the two belonged in the same conversation. The possible connections could go on and on. The point is the same every time, through whatever medium we are seeking resonance.