Ernie Button

Written By Christopher Imlay

Ernie Button’s photography is best known for the portfolios Cerealism (landscapes and portraits created from breakfast cereal) and Vanishing Spirits: The Dried Remains of Single Malt Scotch. 

His photography has been featured in a collaboration with The Macallan Single Malt Scotch in their Masters of Photography series in 2015.  He has exhibited internationally including exhibitions in the United States, China, Scotland, the Czech Republic and Lithuania. 

Photo-Eye Gallery, based in Santa Fe, NM, has published Vanishing Spirits: The Macallan Collection through Photo-eye Editions. Ernie’s whisky photography was featured in the July 2019 issue of National Geographic and his work has been seen widely in publications like The New York Times, Whisky Advocate, Whisky Magazine, American Photo, Popular Photography, Esquire, Wired, Smithsonian and the Huffington Post among others. 

Scientific research explaining the Vanishing Spirits phenomenon was published in the Physics Journal Physical Review Letters in March 2016.  There is a book of his Whisky images that was released through Chronicle Books in May 2022 called The Art of Whisky.  His unique photography was featured on the CBS Sunday Morning program in January 2024. 

Find ernie button on Instagram and online
Videos by Ernie Button
This Is Home (Dark-Side Mix)
This Is Home (Dark-Side Mix)

ARTIST: Peter Gabriel

CREATOR: Ernie Button

SONG: This Is Home (Dark-Side Mix) FROM i/o

ARTIST: Peter Gabriel

CREATOR: Ernie Button

SONG: This Is Home (Dark-Side Mix) FROM i/o

Video info:

I was drawn to work with the song This is Home because the idea of "home" intrigues me.  It’s a word that typically evokes comfort and belonging - rarely is it used in a negative sense.  That emotional weight made the song a compelling foundation for visual exploration.

Travel and photography are two of the great joys in my life.  They allow me to connect with places on a personal level.  The more I return to certain locations, the more those places begin to take on the quiet, familiar feeling of home.  I’ve often noticed the presence of a painted stick-figure on sidewalks and platforms of places I travel to, guiding travelers from one point to another - an anonymous, inanimate travel guide.  That figure became a kind of symbol for me: a silent companion across different destinations.

Train travel holds a unique resonance for me.  Where I live, it’s not a common mode of transportation, so when I travel by train, it feels both novel and deeply reflective.  It’s a shared experience, yet also intensely individual - each of us moving along the same track, heading to vastly different destinations.  It offers space for contemplation, for imagining what it means to return - to oneself, to others, to a place that feels like home.

In this project, I’ve used only my own still photographs that I have taken from some of my most meaningful travels to create all of the AI-assisted video sequences.  Paired with Peter’s lyrics “There's nowhere else I’m going, I know this is home, and home is where I have to be… I know this is my home… you are my home” - the imagery becomes a meditation on what “home” truly means.  For each of us, that meaning varies.  It might be a person, a place, a memory, or a feeling.  But the desire is universal - the need for a space, physical or emotional, that offers us comfort, connection, and belonging.

Song info:

This Is Home is a track taken from Peter Gabriel's album i/o, released on 1 December 2023. This is the Dark-Side Mix, by Tchad Blake.

Words and music by Peter Gabriel. Produced by Peter Gabriel.

Published by Real World Music Ltd. / Sony Music Publishing.

“This Is Home is a love song. It began with inspiration from some of the great Tamla Motown rhythm sections so we’re trying to recreate that in a modern way, complete with the tambourine and handclaps. The groove I like a lot, Tony Levin does a great bass part there.

I did an unusual thing for me in that I tried doing this low voice / high voice thing, so you get this almost conversational voice at the beginning and the second part is a higher, more emotional voice. I thought that would be both intimate and emotive to put the two side by side.”

-pg

Bread and Wine
Bread and Wine

ARTIST: Peter Gabriel

CREATOR: Ernie Button

SONG: Bread and Wine FROM Passion

ARTIST: Peter Gabriel

CREATOR: Ernie Button

SONG: Bread and Wine FROM Passion

Video info

There are musical artists that you connect with at a young age and if you are fortunate enough, they continue to create music as you go through life. Peter Gabriel is one of those artists for me. I can’t remember a time that I haven’t known his music. He has, unknowingly, created a soundtrack for my life.

The imagery that I am using is created through my photography series Vanishing Spirits: The Dried Remains of Single Malt Scotch as well as my travels to Scotland. It is a project that I continue creating images for and have been for the past 17 years. After the last drop of whisky has been consumed, there remains enough information in the residue for these patterns to form. The process from drop to dried image is filled with motion and dynamic patterns that nature brings to us. This video takes the viewer from the micro to macro views of the world through the lens of drying whisky. The first half of the video features the movement of actual drops of whisky drying and the patterns that form in the liquid.  Once the drop reaches a point where it is ready to dry, the “garage door effect” occurs at one side of the drop and moves across the body of liquid, removing all moisture in its wake. 

For the song selection, Peter has so many well-known songs that I wanted a deep cut that would help to complement the type of imagery that I create, forming a true collaboration in the spirit of the 5050 project. Over the decades since the Passion album was released, the music still resonates with me. The song Bread and Wine is meditation to me and nicely complements the meditative movement of the natural world of fluid mechanics.  It feels like the perfect collaboration where the song and the images are trying to support each other.  For the making of this video, I had to listen to the song hundreds of times and every time, as the notes of the tin whistle would fade into the distance, it would leave me with a little more peace, transporting me to another world. 

Early in the Vanishing Spirits project, I started to study images from outer space because my images were naturally taking on an otherworldly feel to them.  I studied planets and shaped my images to closely resemble them. This is my first-time using AI assisted videos and I really wanted to make sure it represented my photography in an authentic way. All of my AI videos were based on images that I created in my photography studio or took on my travels to Scotland.  The red planet seen moving through space is a planet I created with the dried remains of a drop of 50 year old whisky.  Both the song and the images attempt to transport the viewer to another place. 

Song info:

Bread and Wine is a track taken from Peter Gabriel's album Passion, released in 1989. The album was the first release on the newly formed Real World Records.

Written by Peter Gabriel. Produced by Peter Gabriel

Published by Real World Music Ltd. / Sony Music Publishing.

‘Scorsese had asked for a new type of score that was neither ancient nor modern, that was not a pastiche but had clear references to the region, traditions and atmospheres, but was in itself a living thing.’

Christopher Imlay https://www.command-x.com
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