Rhona Bitner

RUTH AND ELMER WELLIN MUSEUM OF ART

"When you hear music, after it's over, it's gone in the air. You can never capture it again." The words are jazz maestro Eric Dolphy's, heard at the end of his posthumously released album Last Date (1964), which was recorded less than a month before his death at age thirty-six. Rhona Bitner's largest and best-known photographic series, "Listen," likewise channels the elegiac poignancy of music's transience. The 427 images, made between 2006 and 2018, survey what Bitner calls the "inner architecture" of American popular music: nightclubs, concert halls, recording studios, and juke joints, but also churches, gyms, and bus stations. An ordinary living room turns out to be where the band that had not yet named itself Nirvana played its first gig at a house party in 1987; a stark penitentiary dining hall is where Johnny Cash recorded his live album At Folsom Prison in 1968; a rolling green field, formerly Max Yasgur's dairy...