After an intense ten days at the Singapore Writers Festival I’m back to considering the role of text and image in my work in a couple of events that are coming up this weekend.
Most of the time, the image is made first. It occurs from a way of looking, an intense gaze in search of something striking. It does not have to be spectacular or manufactured. The image is often found at the intersection between light and chance.
The frame is always deliberate, and what is excluded is sometimes what is unnecessary; an abundance of sky which fills too much of the frame, or cropping out what’s distracting, which could be something as simple as one person too many, or simply a brightly-coloured object.
where not even doggies dare
to leave barks behind
The poem almost always comes afterwards, a kind of reflection to the image. The poem is a mirror held up to the image, translating that striking moment into its own composed shape.
The frame line sits between, an unused space that separates two adjacent images, or frames. If one considers the image and the poem as two successive frames, then the frame line is what divides and connects them.
So join me this Saturday as I talk about my solo photohaiku exhibition, Slide and Tongue, at Intersections Gallery, 34 Kandahar Street at 2pm. More details here: https://www.facebook.com/events/258257094880173/
And the very next day, I’ll be speaking on Today at Apple at the Apple Store on Orchard Road! It’s a talk/photo walk where I share a few ideas and approaches to photography and then we’ll all go for a photo walk together around the Emerald Hill area to take a few images and write a poem based on them.
Register for the session here: https://www.apple.com/sg/today/event/photo-walks-marc-nair-6464123935587211725/?sn=R669
