From the series Home is Not a Place © Johny Pitts, originally commissioned through the Ampersand/Photoworks Fellowship.
Photography and poetry have a long-standing connection and the pairing is enjoying renewed popularity. Rachel Segal Hamilton speaks with photographers and poets to find out why
The sky above is a crisp azure, just a smattering of clouds at its edges. I am wandering through Halesowen town centre with a group of strangers, attending a photo walk led by artist Tom Hicks, who has been commissioned by Ikon Gallery and Transport for West Midlands to create a new public photo-sculpture, inspired by sessions such as this. Shortly, we will head into the library where poet Liz Berry will run a workshop. I will stare at an image by Hicks of a Stourbridge underpass with yellow painted steps and blue tiled walls, jotting words to do with seasides and ice creams, remembering the shimmering possibility of the six-week summer holidays…
Both heavily influenced by their Black Country roots, Hicks and Berry have been working together since 2019, when he approached her after hearing a radio interview in which she expressed an interest in working with other media. Hicks began sending Berry photographs of “overlooked places” he had documented on his journeys by foot or bike with just the location included. In turn, she responded with poems. At first Hicks was surprised by her choices. “There is a minimalism and an architectural focus to my photographs and I’m known for my use of colour,” he says. “Liz tended to choose the quieter, more intimate images.” Berry elucidated what was not visible, the undercurrents, she says. “I don’t need to describe what’s there because Tom has already done that for me.”
Two publications ensued: If Destroyed Still True (The Modernist, 2020) and The Dereliction (Hercules Editions, 2021). These books are among a wave of recent photo-poetry fusions that include collaborations such as Johny Pitts and Roger Robinson’s Home is Not a Place (Harper Collins, 2022), Seamus Murphy and PJ Harvey’s The Hollow of the Hand (Bloomsbury, 2015) as well as solo endeavours, including Anastasia Taylor- Lind’s One Language (Smith|Doorstop, 2022) and Caleb Femi’s Poor (Penguin, 2020). But photo-poetry is almost as old as photography itself, curator David Solo explains. Solo co-organised Photo Poetry Surfaces, a symposium at the 2021 Bristol Photo Festival, at which Hicks and Berry presented work.
“These collaborations work best when the poetry is not a caption and the photography is not an illustration, but rather both raise questions”
Solo, a collector of photo-poetry publications, adds that the earliest example he encountered is a French pamphlet from the 1850s. In these initial forays, he explains, the photography tended to be illustrative and used instead of engravings, so you might have a poem by Robert Burns alongside an image of castle ruins in Scottish landscape. The early 20th century avant-garde Dada and Surrealist movements precipitated a more experimental evolution, of which “the iconic example is Man Ray and Paul Éluard’s Facile [1935],” he says. Latin America has a strong tradition of photo-poetry, from the 1954 Alturas de Macchu Picchu with poems by Pablo Neruda and photographs by Martín Chambi to the current output of contemporary Buenos Aires-based photobook publishers La Luminosa Editorial, which frequently combines text with image.
Many established poets have explored one- off photographic partnerships – such as Ted Hughes with Fay Godwin or Seamus Heaney with Rachel Giese – but generally these alliances drift in and out of vogue. “These collaborations work best when the poetry is not a caption and the photography is not an illustration, but rather both raise questions. The less literal the relationship, the more successful,” says Solo. He adds that the 1960s and 70s proved another fertile phase, and agrees that we are seeing a resurgence again today. Instagram may be a factor, having brought poetry and photography to wider audiences. And, despite exponential digitalisation, the 21st century has also seen a flourishing of independently published print books and zines. But what, in particular, attracts photographers to poetry?
Perhaps it is down to what they share – finite parameters, a heightened view of the world. “Poetry is good at elevating the everyday or looking at ordinary things in a new light and that is what my pictures do. I’m not a classic documentary photographer,” Johny Pitts explains over a video call from Bern, where he is currently guest professor at the university. Pitts was already friends with the writer Roger Robinson and they were keen to team up; in the wake of George Floyd’s murder, their planned collaboration took on a new urgency. “But let’s not react too much to the current moment,” Pitts decided. “Let’s do something unexpected, something we would probably never have been able to do before.” That was the genesis of Home is Not a Place – a book and exhibition uniting Pitts’ images with Robinson’s poems.
Unlike with Hicks and Berry, here the images do not always spark the poems. While the book includes some archive photographs Pitts had amassed over the past decade and a half, it also features new ones produced during a road trip the duo undertook around the coast of the UK – an approach similar to that which Seamus Murphy and PJ Harvey followed between 2011 and 2014 when they travelled together to Kosovo, Afghanistan and Washington, DC, and “Harvey collected words and Murphy collected pictures”. Influenced by Paul Gilroy’s notion of “the Black Atlantic”, Pitts and Robinson wanted to look beyond London, remapping Britain through Black histories of arrival, displacement, change. “What you’re trying to do as a photographer and as a poet, is to work with ghosts, trying to capture things that aren’t actually there,” Pitts says.
The process varied. Sometimes they would respond concurrently to the same moment in their own artistic languages. Other times, images and words would find each other retrospectively, through editing and sequencing. Although it was completely different in form, Pitts was conscious of The Sweet Flypaper of Life, a 1955 portrait of Harlem with images by Roy DeCarava interspersed with words by Langston Hughes, which stitch the photographs together, breathing life into them via a fictional narrative. The book’s form, design and layout are closely bound up with how the images and photographs are produced and then read in relation to each other.
Photojournalist Anastasia Taylor-Lind, who completed an MA at The Poetry School in October 2023 and published her debut collection, One Language, in 2022, makes a similar point, offering some volumes as examples: Caleb Femi’s Poor is the compact size you would expect of a poetry book, with photographs by the author appearing throughout, while the larger Home is Not a Place looks and feels more like a photobook. Taylor-Lind’s book is led by poetry, though it includes images, and her verses allude to a photographic view of the world – a “soft-box dawn”, for example. “This craft of intricate observation is a skill I have developed as a photographer,” she says, adding that both are practices rooted in extraction, removing anything superfluous until only essence remains, each frame or word weighed out.
For Taylor-Lind, there is an important distinction – her photography is journalistic, reporting on events, but her poems are situated. “[My] push towards poetry is also born of my frustration sometimes with the limitations of photography,” she says, explaining that poetry creates space for reflection on her experiences as a witness. “Journalism can give us a lot of information. But when I read poems, I learn about the world beyond facts and figures. Poetry is more successful in taking the specific details of one person or one place or one moment of time and expanding that out into a universal experience.”
Though she has been writing since childhood, Jocelyn Allen’s poetic practice began when she published her photographs of pregnancy and motherhood on Instagram. Accompanying images of her imitating the postures her young children make, they started as captions, witty yet poignant hashtags that increased in length and complexity. “#IHadToLieDownForThisWeeksPictureAsIWasSoTiredButOneMinuteIHaveABurstOfEnergyAndThenIAmTiredAgain,” reads one example and, as this perhaps shows, they play with the idea of self-presentation and authenticity on social media but also help to create distance. “My work has always been therapeutic,” she says. “The hashtags helped me to feel less awkward.” Like Taylor-Lind, she took a course at The Poetry School, and recently exhibited work from her latest project Oh Me, Oh Mãe II at Bell House in Dulwich, together with poems. “Poetry is an extension of my work,” she says, a literary layer enhancing and expanding on the visual.
David Solo observes that the increasingly interdisciplinary nature of academia may be a factor in this wave of photo-poetic cross-pollination. This is true beyond art school, with far less clear distinctions between creative genres. Just as photography has expanded to encompass elements of sculpture, installation, embroidery and performance, so too have televisual, filmic and musical genres blurred in ways that we might not have anticipated a few decades back. Ours is the age of the cultural mash-up and photography and poetry, both “deceptively simple” as Johny Pitts puts it, are ripe for commingling. “We’re using the tools that people use ordinarily every single day – we’re endlessly taking photos, typing words,” says Liz Berry. “But through this accessible medium, we do something different, intense, mysterious.”
