#30 In at least one dream!

“Very poetic,” my brother told me when he looked at some of my new visual work. I laughed because I needed to hear it, he joined in because he wasn’t sure what was going on, and said “Well don’t you like poetry? I thought that was a compliment.”

When people describe an image as poetic, it is often because they don’t know how to read it. Photography, like poetry, uses tools and vocabulary that are not reserved for photographers and poets alone, and can get caught in the middle of art and “reality” so to speak, asking to be in full control of how they are understood.

As a result, both photography, poetry, and their pairing, can easily lean too far towards art or too far towards reality, losing the balance required for these mediums to be in genuine conversation with one another. Their happiest relationship is not about a literal connection. A poem on memory would not necessarily be best placed next to a slow shutterspeed – large aperture – heavy on the grain kind of photograph. Where are the surprises and magic in that? Rather their relationship is formed when they connect playfully. And while the two shouldn’t be crutches for each other, explaining what the other sometimes cannot, their encounter isn’t about beating around the bush either. Instead, the word I usually reach for when a poem or a work of photopoetry has reached me is, exactly! In a way, this is the opposite of encountering a piece I cannot read – it is a piece that took the words right out of my mouth. A piece that told a private joke that enough of us can understand, or popped the kettle on to remind me I’m not alone. And this exactness, this precision, doesn’t bother itself with being logical or linear, rather it is a precision about moments, feelings and ideas that can themselves be blurry, or twofold, messy, or leaking outside of boxes and frameworks, like so much of the human experience on this earth.

The title of this issue comes from Photoworks writer in residence, Hannah Geddes’s conversation with featured artist and poet Siddharth Khajuria. The mundanity of the sentence structure contrasted with the weight of the word dream, sets us up perfectly to explore both the randomness and intention in this issue, which focuses on the relationship and the unrelationship between photography and poetry. As well as the space they hold together requiring its own category, photopoetry.

Geddes also spoke to Andrew Zawacki, Vik Shirley and duo Charlie Fitz & Oscar Vinter, the awarded artists of P5, Photoworks Photopoetry Pamphlet Publishing Programme in partnership with David Solo. ‘Without rivalry or redundancy’ helps place these two mediums as partners who neither mirror nor mimic each other, nor depend on one another, but in their togetherness, through various possible relationships, each become their best self.

Solo, who not only co-directs P5 but is a celebrated photopoetry connoisseur, offers an expanded menu of photopoetry pairings in his essay. These examples move beyond an artist creating both the photography and the poetry, or a photographer and poet working together, into the realm of influence and inspiration, with writers and artists choosing published materials to walk hand in hand with their own work.

Big Bad Boss, a poem by Mitchell Robertson responds to the work of Max Pinckers and Thomas Sauvin, The Future Without You, which featured in Photoworks annual #31 Multi Multi, edited by Diane Smyth. In his writing and spoken word, Robertson brings to life the figure of a man in one of the photographs, who looks sleazy but is literally plastered on a rainbow. This interaction highlights the shared concern of both photography and poetry in creating an image.

Our community submission in this issue is twofold: an image by Joel Hilska-Heikkinen is responded to by three poems, underscoring the plurality within photopoetry, while Rosa Cass’s poem is placed in conversation with Antonia Mayer’s photo series, mysteriously speaking the same dialect of different languages.

In another character piece, selected through a poetry open call for young people aged 13-18, Loch by Mickey Smith offers a vivid image of the poet’s uncle, exploring the tangibility of words and hinting towards how both mediums grapple with the seen and unseen, what is captured in the frame and what exists beyond it.

And Phoebe Winegrove, Photoworks Learning & Engagement Coordinator takes inspiration from Lauren Joy Kennett’s photopoetry book Sorry I’m Not Sorry to create a learning resource, supporting our own playfulness and attempts at photopoetry.

The push and pull of these two mediums, and the treasure map they can unfold between them is full of contradictions. It is certain but multiple. Realistic but absurd. Humble but immensely intense. Perhaps these are the makings of a well-rounded relationship.

Danit Ariel