LIZ MAK

A Week In The Life: Week 9

Follow me each week while I study photography and multimedia at The Salt Institute for Documentary Studies. This week: Photography as poetry. 

I didn’t realize, before Salt, that photography is its own form of poetry. Because of my own inexperience and ignorance, I short-changed the whole medium, never able to connect to it as a fluent language, instead seeing it as a series of disjointed fragments.

No surprise then that reading a photo book proved a greater mystery, given my lack of photographic literacy. The past few weeks at Salt, then, have been one extended, persistent question:  What makes a photo book worth reading?
 
Richard Billingham’s collection of photos, “Ray’s A Laugh,” was one I couldn’t work out. Almost all the images within its pages are riddled with grain, and blurred photos are scattered throughout.  There’s one in particular of two dogs sitting on a couch, their faces indistinct from a too-long exposure.
 
“Why is this photo here?” I asked in class the other day, perplexed. “What makes it worth including?” The response, from Nelson, my photo instructor: Turn to the page before, and turn to the page after, he said. How do these images speak to each other? How do they relate?
 
The image before: a man and his son. The image after: the man and his son, throwing a tennis ball at his father’s unsuspecting face. “Do you see how it goes from one pair to another?” Nelson asked.

Read more at salt.edu