POETRY AND PHOTOGRAPHY
My thought processes about how to signpost my work led me to investigate poetry and photography
“Poetry” is derived from a Greek word meaning to create or to bring something into being. This is close to that of the word “art,” derived from a Latin word referring also to items brought into being by human skill.
Photographer Guy Tal asserts that in writing, poets don’t try to assert their own style as the only valid form of writing. Where he suggests that in photography, expressing meaning poetically, rather than from objective representation, is often criticised. Tal says this shows that photography still has a way to go as an art form, if only just to catch up to where other media already are.
Landscape photographer John Hardiman says “I came to the conclusion that photographs, on the whole, have little to do with photography at all. They represent something else” (Hardiman, 2022). He believes that it’s not the photograph which captures life in a picture, we draw these connections ourselves; to capture them we need to feel them. “With a careful touch of colour and tonality, flavoured to taste in just the right way, we can create our own visual poetry, which I’ll call “landscape poetography”. He likens this to poetry, as the way words flow from one line to another in poetry can be as the lines, colour, tone, and layout in photography. Deliberate changes can throw the reader off surprisingly or make them feel uneasy, I would call this punctum. Words, colours or tones can be used to make us comfortable or mixed to cause questions and ambiguity. He proposes that “Photographs and poems can both be metaphorical, drawing on the visuals but meaning something else”.
Landscape photographer David Ward suggests that photographic description alone is not inspirational, as the exact meaning is elusive as viewers interpret in different ways. He says that images are full of visual nouns, but to signify emotions we need adjectives or adverbs.
Rob Hudson, conceptual landscape photographer, says when exploring how he relates to the landscape, he often resorts to words for clarity and more depth about how he feels and what he wants to represent in a given project; starting by making lists of keywords about feelings, and associations with place. For a project to work he says they must have three key features, be personal, restrictive either through subject, area, style and or theme and that he can be passionate about them.
Describing how thinking like a poet can be inspiring for photography Hudson says artistic expression is about being self-aware, and spending time thinking about our feelings, where we are in the world and so on. He suggests that thinking like a poet in “prose, sometimes poetry and sometimes a simple “self-examination” in words”(Hudson, 2010) is useful. Not that this is poetry but that the processes involved are similar and words can develop and define ideas, which can feed into photography. He describes this photography, experiences of place feeding back into the words creating a “virtuous loop”.
References
Hardiman, J. (2022) Landscape Poetography commentary on our inner world. At: https://www.onlandscape.co.uk/2022/04/landscape-poetography/ (Accessed 08/01/2023).
Hudson, R. (2011) Rob Hudson. At: https://www.onlandscape.co.uk/2011/04/the-skirrid-hill-project-taking-thinking-like-a-poet-to-its-logical-conclusion/ (Accessed 08/09/2022).
Hudson, R. (2010) Creativity. At: https://www.onlandscape.co.uk/2010/11/how-thinking-like-a-poet-can-inspire-creativity-in-landscape-photography/ (Accessed 08/01/2023).
Ward, D. (2012) David Ward on Meaning in Photography – On Landscape. At: https://www.onlandscape.co.uk/2012/02/on-meaning-in-photography/ (Accessed 08/01/2023).
Tal, G. (2021) Colour as Form: Transforming without deforming: Toward subjective expression and away from objective realism. In: On Landscape 254 pp.41–66. At: https://www.onlandscape.co.uk/2022/04/colour-as-form/ (Accessed 27/08/2022).
PHOTOPOETRY
Photopoetry 1845-2015: A critical history: An essay by Michael Nott on the roots of photopoetry (2022)
Not defined in the oxford English dictionary, the first use of the term was 1936 with pairings of both by Constance Phillips. Boulestreau used the term to describe the poems and photographs in Facile (1935) saying “meaning progresses in accordance with the reciprocity of writing and figures: reading becomes interwoven through alternation restitching of the signifier into text and image” (1982).
Photopoetry: A manifesto (Crawford and Mcneath, 2016) suggests that photopoetry should be:
- revealing to engage the readers imagination
- a variety of connective strands between text and image
- not be literal – reader needs to work to gain an understanding
Nott talks about a working practice between poet and photographer. Each are usually wholes when separate. The poetry can be prose, captions, poetic prose or other. He suggests that the best photopoetry retains the independence of both but creates something new when they are interdependent. He outlines that Retrospective photopoetry is when photographers provide images to already written poems. Collaborative is mutually conceived, whilst self-collaborative is less common. However, Nott argues that captions tend to describe images, and that photopoetry is not reductive and places the reader at the centre of their work.
Fuller says both poetry and photography are concerned with images and that poetry can unravel the image. Poems are “gradually constructed in words and images that has to pass muster as an alternative reality. But the photographer is exploiting reality itself, almost directly.” (Fuller and Hurn, 2010:8) They can “ blend, clash, contradict, embolden, evoke…” creating photopoetic images that encourage” serendipity” and “obliquity”. “gradually constructed in words and images that has to pass muster as an alternative reality. But the photographer is exploiting reality itself, almost directly.”
Barthes (2000) talks of when the undevelopable poems and photographs engage in dialogue, saying that the poem may draw the reader beyond the frame of the photograph, or challenge or conform the viewers impression of the photo.
References:
Barthes, R. (2000) Camera Lucida: Reflections on Photography. Translated by Howard, R. London: Vintage books. loc 325
Boulestreau, N. (1982) in “le Photopoem facile ». Meisine. Lausanne. Cited in Nott, M. (2022) Photopoetry 1845–2015, a Critical History. London: Bloomsbury. pp264.
Crawford, R and Mcbeath, N (2016) Manifesto in Chinese Makar. Edinburgh. Easel press.
Fuller, J and Hurn (2010) “A conversation by way of introduction” in Writing the picture. Bridgend. Seren.
Nott, M. (2022) Photopoetry 1845–2015, a Critical History. London: Bloomsbury.
PHOTOGRAPHY AND POETRY
The Photographers Gallery has an interesting page on the above (The Photographer’s Gallery. 2023), it describes that:
“As forms of artistic expression, both poetry and photography can convey a narrative or story without certainty or being merely descriptive. However, both the poetic or photographic act are often still perceived as solitary pursuits, occurring in isolation from other creative acts. Notions of composition, language, light, sound, space, printing, narrative and writing reveal themselves as fundamental to both arts, from collaborations between the media.
This led me to the work below Writing The Picture by David Hurn and John Fuller, and the photo haikus of Ann Attwood.
Writing The Picture by David Hurn and John Fuller (2010)
This book is a collaboration between a leading photographer and poet, where the poet responds to the images and draws out their meaning.
Their conversation in the book’s introduction is illuminating. Fuller describes the photograph as instant, exploiting reality, whilst a poem unravels overtime and is a constructed reality which the reader creates their own picture for them. Hurn believes that the best photographs share the unseen as well as the visible, and Fuller describes how they can “give voice to the photographer’s intensity of silence”, the implicit meaning. Fuller says that to be suitable for an accompanying poem a photograph must be thought provoking and stimulate the imagination, but there is a danger that an accompanying poem can be an intrusion. He generously suggests that the poem may only supply a memory to the photograph and has no life of their own. Fuller emphasises that a caption is quite different to a poem, which is more of a “title”.
I like the description by Fuller that a successful collaboration between photographer and poet can create a third creative personality.
Attwood, A. (1971) Haiku The mood of earth. New York: Charles Scribner & sons.
She says that Haiku is the most verse form like art, and that many of the techniques can be used when making images; the writer must search for just the right word, limited by seventeen syllables, must be evocative. Haiku means beginning, it is begun by the writer and completed by the reader – it must allow a full spectrum of response. She describes the writer’s role as a painter evoking but not describing a scene. It can though take a reader from a closeup scene to a wider picture. She asks can applying Haiku principles help to see “inside out”.
Through dripping branches
The woods and I are one
In the eyes of the rain (Attwood, 1971:31)
Personally, I don’t enjoy her images and haiku however her suggestion of applying the principles of Haiku, careful word selection for evocation rather than description is interesting. Also, the possibility of using poetry to take the reader from one view to a wider context.
References
Attwood, A. (1971) Haiku The mood of earth. New York: Charles Scirbner & sons.
Hurn, D. and Fuller, J. (2010) Writing the Picture. Bridgend Wales: Seren.
The Photographers Gallery (2023) Photography and Poetry At: https://thephotographersgallery.org.uk/photography-culture/photography/photography-and-poetry (Accessed 21/01/2023).
It also led me to this article:
A Few Words. SJ Fowler, A Last Day at the Museum of Futures
Steven J Fowler a writer and artist, lead the course The Written Eye: Poetry & Photography at The Photographers’ Gallery in spring 2018. He says that language, the tool of a poet, is usually short and concentrated. This is not to say that poetry should not make sense, but it does go beyond documentation. He says that it doesn’t tell us what to think, just like other art, usually needing interpretation, “a celebration of paradox, of using the communicative tool to go beyond mere communication”, and is usually a metaphor for other things.
Reference:
A Few Words (2018) At: https://thephotographersgallery.org.uk/photography-culture/few-words (Accessed 08/01/2023).
How poems inspire pictures (MacDonald and McCarthy, 2017)
This article describes and experiment where photographers were asked to read poems and then photograph how they inspire them to photograph. One thing that came out of it was how the poetry led them to want to make images with the same level of intimacy that the poems inspired in them. I was struck by how several described that they tried to hold onto their feelings about the poetry as they wandered and photographed. This is what I do when photographing the woodlands- hold on to my feelings about both the woodlands and human community.
One photographer Todd Heisler describes poetry as “what is right in front of you every day that you fail to see” (MacDonald and MacCarthy, 2018), adding that photography amplifies internal dialogue which is often diluted by outside distractions. He suggests that lyrical poetry is often hindered by too much thought.
Reference:
MacDonald, K. and McCarthy, M. (2018) ‘Turning Poetry Into Photos’ In: The New York Times 17/08/2018 At: https://www.nytimes.com/2018/08/17/us/how-poems-inspire-pictures.html (Accessed 21/01/2023).
PHOTOGRAPHIC WORKS THIS LED ME TO EXPLORE:
Sabine Thoele: Adrift (2019)
Sabine Thoele is a self-taught photographer who started out in street photography and has since moved on to event and Fine Art photography. Over the course of one year Sabine Thoele observed the floating world on the surface of a pond in her local park. Her photographs document the traces of nature which gusts of wind left behind: floating leaves, flowers, seeds, roots, feathers and insects – a mirror of the changing seasons. Held temporarily afloat by surface tension the camera captures them just before they will completely vanish, a last celebration of their being. The eternal cycle of life and death played out in a small manmade pond. A meditation on what has been and what we will remember.
Adrift
Invisible walls of loss
The world a rectangle
measured by your paces
A craving for solitude
brought you here
where still waters promise nothing
Bird less flights dropped their cargo
Drifting anchors for your searching grief
Tomorrow was expected
Memories took its place instead
You wish you had …
Unfortunately, I have been unable to find and other work of hers like this.
Reference:
Sabine Thoele: Adrift (2019) At: https://thephotographersgallery.org.uk/photography-culture/sabine-thoele-adrift (Accessed 08/01/2023).
MY REFLECTIONS
These explorations were to help me to understand how poetry and photography might work together.
I can see the similarity between poetry and photography and understands Hardiman’s proposal for the term landscape poetography where visuals can be metaphorical, meaning something other than the subject. I can see that photographs may be amplified by adding adjectives and adverbs as well as visual nouns as Ward suggests. I identify with Hudson’s description of using words for clarity, by drawing up key words about place (feelings and associations) to help explore the landscape.He also writes that prose or poetry can bring self-examination in words This may be as far as I go with combining my photographs with poetry – using word association to verbalise and develop my reflections.
I need also to consider whether combining my images with poetry may be a way to unravel my images and add context beyond the image. Hurn suggests that accompanying images with poetry may be intrusive, whilst Fowler holds that poetry doesn’t tell us what to think and needs interpretation. However Fuller believes that when they are a successful collaboration they can create a third personality. Barthes in Camera Lucinda also talks of the poem drawing the reader “beyond the frame if the photograph (Barthes, 2020)I will have to experiment.
How I will do this I don’t know yet. I feel it should be with my own poetry, but I am not a poet. I have also looked at forms of poetry to help me such as Haiku and Koans, but I feel if I am able to write anything it will be freeform, most probably nearer prose than poetry; but then poetry can be in any form apparently…
NIKI SOUTH 