Photo Opportunity

Photo Opportunity started seven years ago on its mission. Founding fathers Emile Proper and Dirk van Harten who first started making music together in the 1980s had been fantasizing for years of maybe someday owning that one little record that everybody wanted to have but somehow so far nobody had bothered to record. While shouting "goddamn, then we'll do it ourselves" they withdrew to their studio somewhere in Amsterdam, Holland, and went to work. The whole exercise turned out pretty good: beta 2.003 is an album filled with committed steaming, smoking and swamping urban funk This is how it all started, but since then things have changed. While working on beta 2.003 Emile and Dirk were frequently visited in their studio by Björn Houweling en Andrea Bliksteen. Just like the founding fathers, these are two multi musicians with broad interests, experiences in journalism, big ego's and outspoken opinions. It didn't take long before Björn and Andrea officially joined Photo Opportunity.And it didn't take long either for Photo Opportunity to realise that making sounds is by no way a guarantee for being heard. After all, human ears sometimes only register what the eyes can see. Or turning it round, people have pretty good reasons for shouting: "Shut up! I can't see anything this way!" Plotting and pondering about such phenomena Photo Opportunity discovered video.They also discovered the video-song. Using the VJ software VJamm it is possible to play on a visual sampler by using your keyboard. At the same time that sounds are being produced, photo's, video fragments and animations are being evoked. Sound and vision become a complete unity: you hear what you see and you see what you hear. But there's more to it. Manipulating sounds - for example adjusting pitch, timbre or mix - affects images in a corresponding fashion. And vice versa. This way compositions are created in which sound and vision are inextricably bound up with each other. The video-song was an immediate cause to dust off existing years old film en video projects.Thus Photo Opportunity developed from just one of those bands into a multi media collective, travelling the world with an ever critical attitude. It's members report in various manners of what they come across: sometimes in a song, sometimes in a little movie, sometimes using a combination of both, and sometimes doing something completely different. But always especially for you.