I've been working on a presentation of poetry and photographs for the upcoming PechaKucha Portland, Maine. Hopefully I will get it put together soon. Time's a-wastin'. My plan is to read excerpts from the poetry of Georg Trakl while projecting photographs I've taken this spring and summer with a Holga camera, scanned and manipulated in iPhoto. Photos are inspired by Trakl's poetry but not literal interpretations of his poems.
What I love about Trakl's work is its ambiguity. And if anything, this is what the photographs achieve as well. Curiosity. Like an artifact found centuries later and the discoverer is pondering what it is, how was it used, what value did it offer daily life? I know now this attraction I have for the ambiguous comes from childhood. My grandparents had a painting hanging in their living room of a still life. An acorn was part of the picture, but I never saw it as an acorn. I saw it as a hat or beret. Only when I looked real close, studied it, did I see that it was in fact an acorn. Poorly represented, I might add.
It's these impressions, misinterpretations of reality, where we apply our own meaning to something, though that isn't at all what the object truly is. Yet, is it any less "real?" It is real for the observer. This is what subjectivity is all about. And why the rationalists, the analytical types, despise it. It can't be defined as a specific thing. It is whatever you want it to be. I love that.
