From Pixel to Prose

Aamina Palmer

Have you ever wanted to tell someone exactly what you see in an image, but outside of your mind, it doesn’t speak for itself?

Rooted in my photographic practice of ‘found still lives’, I have created a method to translate the visual language of my photographs as one may a spoken or written language, parsing out personal yet transferrable meaning and perspectives. The translations make more obvious what is gained and lost in each image form. These treatments have allowed me to practice and share the reading of my images of the objects and scenes we pass daily, and transform them into the forms I can expand my image collection with. I have previously explored translating my found still life images into the forms of keywords, 2D objects, 3D objects, HTML components, sound, and now poems through Encode. Each of these forms has its own affordances and losses to me. They also function as in-between formats for one another (transliterations), and in other cases as equals (translations). The photographic narratives I play with are inherently verbal to me, though words are not always necessarily foregrounded, but equals. While developing my own photographic lexicon, I have also felt an interest and a want to teach, with teaching to me being a reciprocal sharing and translation of my working-playing process with others and them sharing their own reflections as an extended (endless) ‘show and tell’.

This selection of poems serves as an example of the following process:

  1. Capture the image, and save it
  2. Pull out the words in frame
  3. Compose using what you see into new form – a new image

See more at antholog.cargo.site

natural

‘natural’ in print

inkjet canyon

naturally, of course!

the sky is blue

and the clouds are white

v e n t

vertical channels

sieving warmed air

visible in the light,

made of gaps and darkness

negative space

a hole in the wall

Reflect | tcelfeR

each pane of glass is now sky

the stone is soft,

a covering to metal arms

it waves and warps in wind

shifting in sight

reflecting my anxiety

of permanent stillness

Torn

a midline Tear

A paper car, broken vision

Stuck, glued, to the wall

closely meeting and forced away

Paper off wood

Of printed wood

Aamina Palmer

Intermedia Artist
As the intermedia artist behind AmiPalm Studio and the director of DCODE Gallery, Aamina makes playful work that lives within the realms of art and design. Her work uses the languages of image and text, and the forms between to bring focus to the everyday sights we pass by, as found art subjects.

You can find her staring too long at that traffic cone... that one there!