Backstage at a Fort Worth concert hall, before a single note reaches the audience,\u00a0DFW-native\u00a0Jacob Johnson is already listening. He\u2019s watching hands hover over strings, faces settle into concentration, instruments waiting to speak. Instead of reaching for his own instrument, Johnson raises a camera\u00a0to capture the moment when music exists everywhere except in the air.<\/p>\n
Those quiet, charged moments form the backbone of \u201cSongs Without Words,\u201d a multidisciplinary project that earned Johnson grants from the Greater Denton Arts Council and the City of Lewisville. The funding supports his first solo photography exhibition, a companion photobook, and a new EP for classical guitar \u2014 three interlocking pieces that explore how music can be experienced visually, even in silence.<\/p>\n
Shot almost entirely in black-and-white, the photographs focus on candid\u00a0backstage encounters with musicians just before they perform. Instruments rest against chairs, fingers test the strings, and dark shadows indicate which sound is being presented. \u201cIn this context, as a musician,\u201d Johnson explains, \u201cmost of my opportunities to take unique photographs, things that not everybody gets to see, are backstage.\u201d The images aren\u2019t meant to document celebrities so much as atmosphere\u2014the suspended moment before sound.<\/p>\n
That access is hard-earned. Over the past two years, Johnson has photographed an unlikely roll call of world-class guitarists passing through the DFW area, including Grammy winner David Russell, Andy McKee, Manuel Barrueco, Marko Topchii, Andrea Gonzalez Caballero, plus more, often during concerts presented by the Allegro Guitar Society. Rather than chasing spectacle, Johnson looks for resonance. \u201cIt\u2019s a mix of portraits of musicians and explicitly musical photographs,\u201d he says, \u201calong with photos that aren\u2019t explicitly musical, but might have a unique rhythm or timbre. Those are things we can pick up on visually as well.\u201d<\/p>\n
The scope of \u201cSongs Without Words\u201d reflects a habit Johnson has cultivated over a lifetime \u2014 blending interests until they are inseparable. \u201cReally, anything that I become interested in,\u201d he says, \u201cI have a history of trying to mix my interests.\u201d<\/p>\n
Music came first. Johnson began piano lessons at age four, switched to trumpet in elementary school, and eventually gained early recognition as a soloist with the Wind Symphony of the Greater Dallas Youth Orchestra after winning its concerto competition. He entered college as a trumpet performance major, but one hallway encounter changed everything. \u201cI heard a student practicing the guitar,\u201d Johnson recalls. \u201cThey were playing something with several melodies happening at the same time. I\u2019d heard that on recordings, but I\u2019d never seen somebody do it in person. And I was like, \u2018I need to learn to do that.\u2019\u201d<\/p>\n
The classical guitar offered independence and portability. \u201cA classical guitar can accompany you to the top of a mountain,\u201d he says. \u201cIf you play the piano, good luck.\u201d He left the trumpet department and committed fully to strings, eventually expanding backward in time to the lute. That decision, too, was driven by sound, or rather, authenticity.\u00a0<\/p>\n
\u201cI was looking at this 16th-century music and thinking it can\u2019t sound the same on a modern instrument. It just can\u2019t,\u201d Johnson says regarding why he chose the lute.\u00a0<\/p>\n
His curiosity has taken him far afield, with performances at the Collegiate Peaks Guitar Retreat in Colorado, for the Utah and Sacramento Guitar Societies, and at Lute Society of America LuteFest West, while remaining rooted in North Texas. Along the way, he has taught privately, composed and arranged music, published essays, and worked with nonprofit arts organizations. That last experience led him back to school for a graduate degree in arts organization management. \u201cArtists don\u2019t tend to have a lot of business training,\u201d Johnson says. \u201cAnd so these arts organizations, they tend to struggle because of that.\u201d<\/p>\n
Photography entered the picture almost accidentally. After completing his debut album, \u201cThe Ghosts of Dawn,\u201d released June 21, 2023, Johnson was exhausted. The album, which features \u201cAstrolabe,\u201d a suite written for him by Dallas composer Eddie Healy and inspired by a medieval astronomical calculator, had consumed more than a year of focused work. \u201cI needed some kind of a creative outlet that wasn\u2019t musical,\u201d he says. \u201cAnd I found my grandmother\u2019s old Kodak Brownie camera, and I took it out just to have some fun.\u201d<\/p>\n
What began as decompression became obsession. Johnson started developing his own film, partly out of necessity and partly out of control. \u201cEspecially the one-hour photo places,\u201d he says, \u201cyou don\u2019t even get your negatives back. The people developing it have very little actual experience. They\u2019re not out shooting film themselves.\u201d Building a darkroom was inevitable. \u201cWatching an image come out after you have a blank page,\u201d he says, \u201cthere\u2019s something really special about that.\u201d<\/p>\n
\u201cSongs Without Words\u201d grew organically from years of carrying a camera everywhere. \u201cI wasn\u2019t initially thinking of a project,\u201d Johnson admits. \u201cIt 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.\u201d The title, borrowed from the 19th-century musical form popularized by Mendelssohn, felt inevitable.<\/p>\n
Johnson hopes to pair the exhibition with live performance, photographs on the wall, music in the air, and conversation in between. \u201cIdeally, I\u2019d like to have an exhibition and play the music too,\u201d he says. \u201cPlay about twenty minutes of music and just hang out and chat. If people have questions about photography or music, it\u2019s nice to interact.\u201d<\/p>\n
Johnson\u2019s solo exhibition will run at the Lewisville Grand Theater from July 18 through August 15, 2026.\u00a0<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Backstage at a Fort Worth concert hall, before a single note reaches the audience,\u00a0DFW-native\u00a0Jacob Johnson is already listening.…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":104394,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[10],"tags":[6595,2635,889,6917,440,10498,116,118,117,574,8337,19834,1012,92],"class_list":["post-104393","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-fort-worth","tag-art","tag-artist","tag-arts-and-culture","tag-dfw","tag-event","tag-exhibition","tag-fort-worth","tag-fort-worth-headlines","tag-fort-worth-news","tag-live-music","tag-musician","tag-photographer","tag-stephen-montoya","tag-top-story"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-tx\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/104393","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-tx\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-tx\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-tx\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-tx\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=104393"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-tx\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/104393\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-tx\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/104394"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-tx\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=104393"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-tx\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=104393"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-tx\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=104393"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}