SLP Photobook Proposal

My semester-long project will be an extension of my SMP in poetry and photography, combining the two mediums in a book that I predict will be 8.5x11 inches in dimension, but might end up being 11x11 inches if the poems and photographs are too crowded onto the pages. I want to keep the book smaller in dimension so that it is very portable. I am currently writing more and revising my poems, and will have at least 30 poems to use in my book. Most of these poems will be one page long or less. They vary in shape, and some deliberately play with shape to parallel the content.

I plan to produce at least 25 prints that accompany but do not necessarily illustrate the poems. So far I have printed six, and they are black and white images with rather high contrast. I think the consistency of this visual choice fits well with the content of the poems, but I will also be shooting some color film and making cyanotype images, which I will hopefully be able to integrate into the book. I am not sure yet how I will use sequencing to integrate these color images, but I have been working with sequencing the poems and have a better idea of how things are going to flow.

The content of my work involves material (non-spiritual) death and trying to naturalize what is usually depicted as grotesque decay. It involves an acceptance of the natural processes that act upon our bodies, and coming to terms with the loss of consciousness that occurs when we die. I will be trying to convey this in my poems by literally photographing skeletons (for example, a deer skeleton that was in my backyard in Howard County), using photographs from an abandoned building complex that is deteriorating, taking photographs of people in motion / in nature, and continuing to find more ways to convey impermanence, passing time, and the naturalness of death.

I have gotten a lot of inspiration from Sally Mann, Francesca Woodman, Ralph Eugene Meatyard, Diane Arbus, and surrealist photographers, and plan to branch from their work as I photograph. The list of poets is much longer, but a few that I have come to the most are Sylvia Plath, Nick Flynn, Frank Bidart, Robert Creeley, Charles Simic, Anne Sexton, and Brion Gysin. I won’t get into my whole SMP, but I am basically borrowing from the self-reflection of confessional and neo-confessional poets, while using postmodern American tools for writing against the status quo, such as metonymy, free association, and disjunctive work.

My black and white prints are wet darkroom prints that will be scanned into the computer, but the color negatives will be scanned and worked on digitally. I don’t know yet whether I am going to alternate photos and poems, but I think it might end up being more interesting if I organize them in clusters. I will probably have a better idea of this when I have more prints to work with and can lay them out visually with the poems. I think I am going to keep the left pages of each spread blank, and maybe break this pattern every once in a while throughout the book. One more thing I might try to do is collage my photographs together, in some cases, if this seems that it will yield interesting results.