(Click on image for detailed viewing)
The Poetics of Voice
"with appreciation to Lawrence Lipking,"
The life of the Poet:
Beginning and ending Poetic Careers
" If the lives of the Poet/Artist tend to be peripheral to
the insides of work,
the life of the artist is often the life of the work:
then to become the life of the beholder.?"
The artist [beholder] embracing the work might recognize its autonomy?
Lawrence Lipking underscores the value that an artist's life might encourage vision and a poet's voice: suggesting this might also offer a rationalization, a clarity not to be mistaken for truth. A photograph's truth rests in its metadata, its formal and material rendering. With this one becomes reliant on objectivity, and as is currently suggested the presence of "fake" and the challenged rendering: bringing into question one's facility/sensitivity for both evidence and metaphor.
The "insides of a work"?
Photography's analogue negative on film or paper emulsion begins as a latent image: an image registered in the emulsion to be developed, its characteristic to be determined by silver content and directly related, sensitivity to light. Note: the actual visual quality of the image is determined by exposure control taking into account the amount of light available and the desired rendering, whether of maximum depth of field or limited through aperture/shutter speed adjustment. The development of the image determines appearance, grain structure and the subsequent aesthetic content of the image.The critical difference between this and the digital image is that the film becomes the sensor and the latent image results in a translation of 1's and 0's.
However, the true beginning of metadata, whether analogue or digital resides in intent. The artist's initial impulses, experiences and insight might be shaped to both the present and to the value of history and continuity. This is true to photography as to any of the creative arts. It is in the presence of the "other" that voice is initiated.
So how is it that a work reveals its true self, the portrait of the self?
One looking carefully at the above images might discern mutual elements of containment, layering and of transparency: all of which lead to an understanding for passage. The time line, day>month>year>hour>minute>second offers an initial containment, confirming a moment observed.
Part 1: The Heroics of the Banal
The Jacob M. Lowy Collection is Canada's national treasure of old and rare Hebraic and Judaica. Its intellectual scope spans religious, scientific, historical and philological thought emanating from presses in North America, Europe, Africa and Asia. It now comprises approximately 3000 volumes printed between the 15th and 20th centuries.
Friends of Library Archives Canada
The above three works introduce the still life as a staging for thought.
All this might lead one to pay attention to the privacy of knowledge and the value for empathy. It is true that to give value to another, one must first value the self, not a self portrait but a portrait of the self.
Light to dark plays a drama between what is revealed, disclosed and what must remain privileged, in the interim of a conversation, there is a pause, as Lyotard suggests, a Differend, a moment of quiet reassurance within the presence of doubt.
