About Charles Brooks
PHOTOGRAPHER · CELLIST · MELBOURNE
I photograph the spaces we rarely get to see. Inside a violin, a piano or a flute, the familiar becomes a landscape: shaped by a maker’s hand, changed by years of music, and brought into view through light.
I am a New Zealand-born photographer based in Melbourne, and the creator of Architecture in Music. Before photography became my full-time work in 2016, I spent two decades as a professional cellist. That life among instruments still shapes how I see them.
A life in music
I fell in love with the cello at eleven and went on to study in Auckland, Wellington and Brisbane. My performing career took me to principal cello positions with the Shenzhen and Guiyang symphony orchestras in China, then to the Orquesta de Cámara de Valdivia in Chile, and later to the Orquestra Sinfônica Municipal de São Paulo in Brazil.
Along the way, photography grew from a school-age interest into a second vocation. China offered landscapes and street scenes; Chile brought extraordinary night skies. In São Paulo, I turned the camera towards the musicians around me and the opera house we worked in. Returning to New Zealand in 2016, I began photographing musicians professionally and teaching night-sky photography.
Looking inside
Architecture in Music began during the pandemic. Concerts had stopped, and workshops were filled with instruments awaiting repair and servicing. Working with luthiers and wind technicians, I began exploring their hidden interiors with specialist probe lenses.
The photographs are made through existing openings. Hundreds, and sometimes thousands, of exposures are combined using focus stacking and panoramic techniques, revealing detail beyond what a single frame can hold. A chamber only millimetres across can appear large enough to walk through.
For me, the fascination is as much human as technical. Tool marks, repairs and worn surfaces carry the lives of the people who made, played and cared for these instruments. The work invites a closer look at the craftsmanship that makes music possible.
Explore Architecture in Music ↗
Selected press
“unique insight into rarely seen textures, details, and patinas.”
— Kate Mothes, Colossal, 2023 ↗
“Mystical interiors of musical instruments revealed in artist’s striking photography”
— Classic FM, 2023 ↗
DER SPIEGEL: Hier spielt die Musik ↗
The book
Architecture in Music brings the photographs together with the stories of the instruments, their makers and the people who play them. It is an invitation to spend time with these hidden spaces, their histories and their extraordinary detail.
Studio & enquiries
Based in Melbourne, Australia.
Born in New Zealand.
For help choosing a print, exhibition proposals, licensing or editorial enquiries, contact me directly.
Collect the work
Explore available photographs, sizes and editions at Architecture in Music.
