After launching at Book Bar in November 2025 in conversation with my erstwhile editor and publisher Jeremy Fernando, I’m excited to formally launch Undulations in Toronto! In the depths of winter, no less. Come for an invigorating convesation with writer and musician Jacqueline Chia and listen as I read some of the poems and talk about my wider practice with photography and poetry.
RSVP: https://www.eventbrite.ca/e/book-launch-marc-nair-tickets-1977773508805
Meanwhile, here are some thoughts on the book and on this dialogic process between text and image that continues to fascinate.
Undulations began as a way of listening.
Point Reyes, with its cliffs dissolving into fog and its estuaries breathing with the tide, offered not only vistas but conversations—whispers of wind through cypress, the long hush of the Pacific, the voices of people who once walked these paths and those who continue to live in relation to this place.
To stand in such a landscape is to be reminded that the land itself is never still. It shifts, bends, recedes, advances—always undulating. The self is also undulating, a major life shift, a leap from Singapore to Canada. Maybe that’s why part of me resonated so much with Point Reyes.
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Photography, for me, is the first act of attention. A photograph asks to stop and hold still what is in motion. It is a way of recognizing that something ephemeral—the way light drapes itself across a dune, the way tule elk pause against the horizon—can be gathered, if only briefly.
The meanings of photographs are never fixed, are not contained solely within the photographs themselves. They are read against a viewer’s own lived experience and rely on a combination of the viewer’s sensitivity, knowledge and understanding as well as the specific context in which the image is seen.
This is where poetry enters. Writing is a second listening, a return to the same moment but with a different ear. The poem asks what the image does not reveal: What does it mean to walk here, to dwell in a landscape layered with histories of ranching, migration, erasure, and resilience? How do we read geography not as a backdrop, but as an active partner in memory and imagination?
The dialogic practice of pairing poems with photographs became a way of inhabiting both silence and speech. Together, they produced a rhythm of call and response, each form extending what the other could not hold alone. But neither can be too complex, otherwise they will become too difficult to exist relationally and demand their own spaces.
Chinese Makars, a 2016 book by Robert Crawford of contemporary Scottish responses to Chinese poets paired with photographs by Norman McBeath contains a ‘Photopoetry Manifesto’ which identifies aspects of their shared practice:
- Photopoetry is more interesting and engaging when the photograph is not a literal illustration of the poem; and vice versa
- Both poem and photograph should be able to stand alone in their own right.
- The pairing of poem and photograph should bring more depth, so each gains something from the collocation.
- The pairing should allow for serendipity. This is partly to do with the process of choosing which pairings to make, and partly due to the power of the pairing to excite.
- Within a set of pairings there should be a range of connective strands: again like a relationship, where there are lots of different facets of attraction and at the same time a deep consistency.
This dialogic rhythm guided the structure of Undulations: not as a linear account of Point Reyes, but as a constellation of meditations—on the people encountered, the land observed, and the intimate negotiations between presence and absence.
In shaping the book, I came to see this dialogue as more than aesthetic—it was also philosophical. Landscape photography often risks objectifying place, turning it into scenic cliches. Poetry risks the opposite: dissolving place into metaphor, which isn’t bad in and of itself, but could end up becoming too insular. By allowing each form to question and counterbalance the other, I sought to honor Point Reyes as both material and mysterious, as a geography that resists simplification. The undulating coastlines became a metaphor not just for the land, but for the practice itself—an ongoing oscillation between seeing and saying, between external witness and internal reflection.
Weaving in and around this is also the life-sized undulations that Carolyn and I have experienced in the year or so since we moved from Singapore to Canada, a leap from one continent to another, a wrenching, a displacement.
Ultimately, Undulations is not just a portrait of Point Reyes but an invitation to think with it.
The photographs ask: what is here?
The poems ask: what remains after we see?
Together, they trace how the geography of a place becomes a geography of thought, reminding us that to encounter landscape is also to encounter ourselves—unfixed, shifting, and always in motion.
