https://www.photopoetrysurfaces.com my chat with David Solo for the SURFACES Opening Night on June 17 2021, where I talked a lot about my approaches to photopoetry and my collaborative work with Bard Torgersen CROWFINGER https://www.stevenjfowler.com/crowfinger
New course : The Writing Eye
EXPLORING PHOTOPOETRY & FILMPOETRY
An online course. Begins May 2nd 2021, running for 7 weeks.
All information and booking here www.poembrut.com/courses
The potential of image and text is an endless field of creative exploration. Yet, despite the ubiquitous access we have to cameras, it remains underexplored and underappreciated as its own medium. This course traces the history of photopoetry and filmpoetry and draws it into the 21st century, rooted in making over theory, method over all else - it aims to provoke questions while exploring examples from a variety of fields - from conceptual art to surrealism, collage to concrete poetry, from modernism to collaborative practice.
We ask what makes up the essence of photography, film and poetry, and how might they interact to move beyond traditions in both fields, as something new, a true photopoetry or filmpoetry? We ask what is hybridity, truly, and simultaneity, and photoliteracy, and illustration? What is a poem in time, on film? How has the technology needed for the cinema and video evolved what a poem might be? What is the line between documentation and artwork?
Poet-photographer-filmmakers featured on the course will range from the historical to the contemporary, from canonical modern figures to "outsider" artists, from Laszlo Moholy-Nagy to Barbara Kruger, Francesca Woodman to August Strindberg, Peter Greenaway to Hamish Fulton, Blaise Cendrars to Martha Rosler, Susan Hiller to Yamamoto Kansuke, Paul Muldoon / Norman McBeath to Paul Eluard / Man Ray.
Published : CROWFINGER
Crowfinger, by Bård Torgersen and I, is now available from Sampson Low sampsonlow.co/2020/11/23/crowfinger-sj-fowler-and-bard-torgersen/
36 pages of full colour photopoetry printed in a limited edition of 200. £4.99.
From the publisher “The boldest take on photopoetry and corvids of the last decade, Crowfinger is a book that offers more than meets the eye. Juxtaposing Torgersen’s candid and striking photographs of Norwegian forests with Fowler’s precise and unrelenting poetry, it comes at you like evening fog between the trees." www.stevenjfowler.com/crowfinger
“This is menacing and funny and antic and accusatory and gorgeous and just the best kind of collaboration. It gives us a new way into ekphrasis and a new maze to lose ourselves in. Were you having beautiful thoughts in the beautiful place? Can you just be f*cking honest for once in your life?” Luke Kennard, poet
“The only thing I could compare this book to is going for a run in the forest in the middle of the night. Surrounded by pitch black you hurtle yourself into a little pocket of light whilst trying your best to ignore whatever it is that’s watching you from the shadows. I’m not sure if I read the book or the book read me.” Mikael Buck, photographer
Below, the launch of CROWFINGER, at Kingston Quaker’s Centre on December 3rd 2020, as part of Writers’ Kingston’s celebration of Sampson Low press.
A note on : Photo Pedagogy presents Photo Poetry
Was really happy to contribute to this extraordinary resource on the brilliant Photo Pedagogy project exploring Photo Poetry. https://www.photopedagogy.com/photopoetry.html
The site is for teachers of photography who are happy to share aspects of their practice. The site is about the art (and science) of photography teaching. And what an incredible job Jon Nichols has done with the Photo Poetry section. Really it’s more comprehensive than my resources, which I developed for the Photographer’s Gallery and currently have a 100 slide powerpoint from I subject some students too. It really is worth a dig.
“The term 'photopoetry' and its various alternatives - photopoème, photoetry, photoverse, photo-graffiti etc. - attempts to describe an art form in which the poetry and photography are equally important and, often, directly and symbiotically related…. These correspondences between photography and poetry are brought into sharp relief by photopoetry - specific examples of published collaborations between photographers and poets (sometimes the same person). Writer and artist S. J. Fowler describes the challenge of exploring photopoetry as follows:
To begin, we must ask ourselves what these mediums actually are, at heart, and then what they can be together? Finally, what is the purpose of their combination? What can they do together? And why is it relatively rare to see a cohesive combination of the two - with fidelity to poetry that isn’t just text, or discourse, or opinion, and photography that isn’t just pictorial?
-- S. J. Fowler