Article Response

This discussion of the interaction between Wright’s poetry and Luster’s photography made me think a lot about the role of the camera in receiving/creating a reality simultaneously. The camera was described as an “O,” an opening, as opposed to its traditional theoretical association with a probing and forceful/manipulative phallus-like object. I believe I have read more about this in film classes – horror film and sex in American cinema, as it seems especially pertinent to these subjects. This was quite an interesting re-viewing to me, as I have tended to think about the camera as a more probing device, while that doesn’t seem to make full sense considering the receptive/creative side of both the camera and the eye.

To me, this points to a much greater interactivity between the often binarized penetrative/receptive roles of camera and subject in film and photography, and where the “origins” lie – in the photographer’s eye, the subject’s reality, or both. The concept of the subject as “subjected” was brought up, as well as the eagerness of the subject to be photographed, which introduces an interesting, possibly ambivalent relationship of the photographer and the photographed. The article also discussed Wright’s focus on bodily secretions, reproductive organs, disorienting perspectives, and childbirth, with the body being a source of power and energy, like the creative capacity –and the photographer, the writer, and the subject.

There was a lot of discussion of “openings” in relation to the ekphrastic process, as a production of the creative mind lends itself to being viewed by other creative persons who it then inspires to create. Wright was quoted as saying, “My eye is what I work off… I look for the line of the eye.” This is really exciting to hear a poet say, though it makes a lot of sense as she is a writer who has worked in close contact with photographers. It also brings up the visual nature of text, especially poetry, in which the visual form is so important. Some very literal examples are shaped poetry and organic poetry, which often tries to recreate the “breath” of natural and immediate experience through line spacings. The “line” of the eye can also be recreated in the sounds and rhythm of poetry, which similarly lead us through poems, like the framing and composition of a photograph leads us from edge to edge or otherwise in a specific direction through the photograph.

It was interesting to read about how Wright’s poetry focuses, like photography, on “angles of view, light sources (one or many?), light-dark contrasts (sharp or diffuse?), shadow and hue.” The role of photographic language seems very important in her writing, without directly speaking of the technical processes of photographing. I also found very fascinating the line, “To make familiar in her poems the work of a camera is also to make odd the work of an eye.” Writing about the subjective viewing of a chopped reality is very different from writing about the whole spread of reality that we generally accept in our everyday viewing. The article discusses the postsurgical eye and relearning reality. It also introduces Muybridge and the interaction between stillness and movement, as he sequenced still photographs chronologically to create a film-like effect before the moving picture was a cultural phenomenon.

The “stillness” of the photograph, showing us a moment in reality – even if it conveys motion through a long exposure or otherwise – versus the narrative nature of writing and poetry, is a fascinating tension in the ekphrastic process. It is also interesting to consider the cultural relationship between the photograph and evidence, valid experience, as one theorist mentioned in the article proposes as a reason for photography’s superiority to narrative/poetry. However, being aware of the manipulability of the world photographed, through distortions such as introducing props and altering lenses, makes the ekphrastic process more interesting to me. Photography can be just as malleable as fictional writing, but it also can be very literal, so the possibilities for representation of other mediums (and textual representations of photographs) seem completely unlimited to me.