SF Symphony Backstage Portraits — Part 3
Behind the Curtain at the San Francisco Symphony
This is the third installment of an ongoing portrait series documenting musicians in the San Francisco Symphony Orchestra — shot backstage at Davies Symphony Hall before performance. The series began with a single session and has grown into a multi-part project that Marc Olivier Le Blanc continues to expand as access and scheduling allow.
Backstage at Davies Hall is a world of its own. The musicians warm up, tune, adjust, and move through their pre-performance routines with a combination of focus and calm that is compelling to photograph. There is no performance yet — the portrait is made in the transition between the ordinary and the extraordinary, in the moment before the lights come up.
The Ongoing Backstage Portrait Series
What makes a portrait series valuable — as an editorial project, and as an archive — is accumulation. A single backstage portrait of a symphony musician is interesting. A series of twenty or thirty, made over multiple visits and multiple seasons, begins to do something else: it becomes a document of an institution, of a way of working, of a culture.
Marc Olivier Le Blanc is a professional photographer and editorial photographer based in San Francisco, and the SF Symphony series is part of a broader practice of long-form portrait documentation that includes projects with the San Francisco Opera, the San Francisco Arts Commission, and other cultural institutions in the Bay Area.
This third installment adds new faces to the series, new instruments, and new corners of the backstage environment. The portraits were shot using available light wherever possible — the fluorescent backstage lighting that most photographers would avoid becomes, with the right framing, a source of documentary authenticity.
Editorial Music Photography in San Francisco
Marc Olivier Le Blanc works regularly as an editorial portrait photographer and professional photographer for arts organizations, cultural institutions, and music publications in San Francisco and the Bay Area. His work with the San Francisco Symphony and San Francisco Opera has been published in the San Francisco Chronicle, SFCV, the Mercury News, and Grammy.com.
Follow the full SF Symphony backstage portrait series on the blog, Part 1 and Part 2, or get in touch if you're an arts organization looking for an editorial photographer.
Marc Olivier Le Blanc is a San Francisco professional photographer working with arts organizations, cultural institutions, and publications across the Bay Area. His clients include tech founders, CEOs, and executives across Silicon Valley alongside cultural and editorial work.
