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:
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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