ONE COULD DO WORSE THAN BE A MAKER OF IMAGERY
Photography, Poetry and the Lives of Images
Production of Frederick Buell and FHB Imagery.
ACT NOW, ACT NOW! A doer in midlife motion. Both an image (a likeness) of the literal woman and perhaps an image of (a metaphor for) anyone in determined, unhesitating action.
Making images keeps our imaginations alive. It gives us worlds to explore beyond our material lives, which are often so disappointing or confining. Doing it is like being able to take a full breath of fresh air after a bad chest ailment. It is to find meaning in what otherwise is a senseless snarl or labyrinth with no way out. Making images is the foundation of both poetry and photography.
But the two are so different.
Photographic images are supposedly literal pictures of something—of people, scenes, landscapes, real things—that the camera lens takes in. Photographic images are thus not the same as images in language. Images made from language are called metaphors, similes, symbols, metonymy etc.—which people who study literature routinely call “figures.” Camera images are (again, supposedly) “captures” of reality or “exposures” to it: records, not refigurings of the world.
Poems, in contrast, are made for the express purpose of refiguring the world. They have no other reason for being. In them, metaphors are completely at home. In poems, metaphors subtly materialize or dynamically burst out of their contexts and make readers see the world anew.
They come both by and with gentle or dramatic surprise—surprise that indicates they exceed the will even of their creator. When Robert Frost quietly sums up his life by writing that he has had a lover’s quarrel with the world, a smile may steal across readers’ faces, as they try the idea on like a coat and find pleasure in feeling how it might fit them as well as Frost.
A Woman Walks in a Soldiery, Determined Fashion down a stream of time. The image is, to be sure, a capture of a person on a canyon walkway, but is perhaps more insistent in what it suggests: that she is on a journey, not an errand. Metaphor hovers, perhaps, even more tantalizingly about her.
On the other hand, however, the most memorable photographic images transform the camera from a recording device into a revelatory one. They refigure what they capture. Think of Dorothea Lange’s depression-era portraits; they are specific individuals, but they are also moving, unforgettable images of human despair. Or Diane Arbus’ grotesque realizations of her subjects become metaphors of an all-too-real world with a hidden, repressed, encompassing malaise.
Thus, one could say that making photographs like these has it all. It captures both the world as it is and a refigured world, a world charged with feeling and meaning.
Photography makes the world into a theater, waiting for its actors.
Or, on the third hand, one could say that photography never gets as far as poetry does into the realm of metaphor. It still drags its bulky and heavy machinery behind itself. It’s too tied to the literal world to really take flight. Making a picture is simply too easy to do for the results to be art. All photography does is little more than wait for the world to organize itself in some striking way—or else hire actors, position them awkwardly, set up lights and weather machinery, and rely on manipulations (formerly by chemicals, now via software) to jack it up off the level of the literal.
Or conversely, photography’s early claims to uniquely be a transparent window on the world, to represent things as they are, to capture reality have over time become hollow. With all of the shaping powers that computers and software (as opposed to chemistry) have brought to photography, it is now an art that not only doesn’t uniquely capture reality but one that can cleverly and completely transform it.
Perhaps all of these contradictory assertions about the differences and similarities between poetic and photographic images are true. Or/and perhaps what Shakespeare wrote about poetry as an art applies equally to photography: that “the truest” poetry/photography “is the most seeming” (i.e. artful).
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