Poetry without words

“Poetry is language as its most distilled and most powerful”. – Rita Dove

Despite poetry and photography being two completely different mediums – poems deal with written words where photography creates images, the two forms of artistic expressions share a lot of similarities. For instance, both writing and photography rely on narratives, be it visual or written to impart a viewpoint. Often, we refer to photographs as having “poetic” or “lyrical” qualities. It was an ancient Roman poet named Quinto Orazio Flacco (known as Orazio) who first said that “a picture is a poem without words“. But what does it mean by saying photographs as having poetic quality?

Poems and photographs are both representations of something, and they both deal with symbols. It is a combination of the photographic image with the verbal images we constructed from reading a poem. The photograph is the representation of visual language; the written word is the image of spoken language. Both are abstractions of reality, cultivating an experience of heightened perception, an intensified moment of looking and feeling, brought about by the union of visual and verbal images that can spark our imagination about the world we are living in.

Photography uses visual imagery to convey a story, a mood, or an idea without the freedom of words to aid us. We are challenged by the limitations of light, visual composition, and the scene itself to “write” the poetry we see with our eyes using a camera instead of a pen. Photographs also struggle with the challenge of being pictorial representation of things. We mostly take what we see with images as granted without any further thoughts, whereas with poems, more cognitive effort is needed to conjure an image which is given by words. Instead of looking at an image which gives all the information at a mere glance, arranged words require more mental effort to put the information together and absorb their meanings, and with the extra effort, the meaning tends to linger longer.

With poems, it is unlikely I will remember the whole piece, more often than not a line or two that will remain in my memory for years. I find the same aspiration can also apply to photography. When I compose an image, I like to think there is a “hook”, that one element that will speak of the essence of the message I hope to import. How much of an image will remain in our memory without a necessary element? Can we strip the composition down to its essence so there is a clearer vision to an image, hence it may linger longer in our conscious?

This ultimately leads to what I hope to achieve with my photography: instead of making images that are actual recordings of what I see and are aesthetically pleasing, I hope to go beyond the obvious and give more than what is perceived, be it a sense of mystery, and more often an emotional response. Instilling ambiguity in images is an effective way to challenge viewers to spend time to interpret what is being presented. It is certainly not an easy goal to achieve, yet I find myself increasingly enjoy the challenge and find great satisfaction whenever I am able to achieve it.