The decision to complement the poetry on Likestarlings with an equivalent project using photography seemed to be an obvious progression, but it wasn’t until I began the process itself – by participating in the first Likestarlings picture chain with Ahmet Unver – that the specificity of photography on Likestarlings (as opposed to other visual arts) became all the more salient.

Whilst out with my camera trying to capture my first response, I took a phone call from a friend and attempted to explain the Likestarlings project to them, and the process by which I was attempting to respond to Ahmet’s image. In articulating this I used the term “literary” to describe what i was trying to do – referring both to my understanding of Ahmet’s image, and to the construction of my response.

This got me recalling and re-reading some posts Alec Soth wrote on the subject of poetry and photography before he’d laid the writing to rest for a while (although he can now sometimes be seen over at the magnum blog) and there, as if  to vindicate my expression, was a quote from a review of Edward Weston’s 1946 MoMA Exhibition written by Clement Greenberg:

…in more than one way, photography is closer today to literature than it is to the other graphic arts. (It would be illumination, perhaps, to draw a parallel between photography and prose in their respective historical and aesthetic relations to painting and poetry.) The final moral is: let photography be “literary.”

Alec’s interest in the poetry of photography is self-evident in his beautiful books (Sleeping by the Mississippi, 2004; Niagara, 2006; Dog Days Bogata, 2007) and at the time of digging out the above quote he was writing a steady stream of posts on the photographer Tod Papageorge, a photographer who before becoming a photographer was studying and writing poetry. I don’t want to further plagiarise Alec’s (far more) rigorous research (than mine), but it’d be a shame not to reproduce another quote, this time from Papageorge’s introduction to Gary Winongrand’s book Public Relations (1977):

A photograph is just a picture – or, as Winogrand would have it, “the illusion of a literal description of a piece of time and space.” It is as wanton a fiction as any description; but it is also, of course, a particularly convincing one because it so specifically locates and describes what it shows. As a poet knows that the words he chooses for his poem will, by their particular combination, resonate with a power that is the gift of language itself, so a photographer has at his disposal a system of visual indication that, even without his conscious deliberation, will describe the world with a unique, mimetic energy.

Auden’s observation that “it is both the glory and the shame of poetry that its medium is not its private property, that a poet cannot invent his words,” could also be said of the photographer’s relation to the things of the physical world: that he cannot invent them. By being fictions and, at the same moment, returning their subjects to us with a compelling fidelity, both photographs and poems work with the same surprise…

‘Visual poets’ and such terms have long become clichés for describing photographers whose work warrants reading in the way that one might a poem. But for many photographers today the attempt to be perceived as literary – in book form – is of more, or equal, importance to the exhibiting of prints. The rapid rise (in popularity and value) of photo-books attests to this and Papageorge’s Passing through Eden is an excellent of example of a photo book with such literary achievements – one in which the book’s sequence plays as considerable a part as the images themselves.

Whether the experience for those taking part in the Likestarlings’ photography section, and indeed of those reading them, is literary, or not, can be judged in time. Either way, we’re thrilled to have added the section and look forward to the diverse approaches in which different photographers are sure to address the project.