Statement of Poetics

A poet and translator based in L.A., my friend Guy Bennett recently put me onto the work of Raymond Depardon. Reading Errance (Seuil, 2000), which comprises images by the Magnum photographer accompanied by his clean, no-frills prose en face, I have found affinities—albeit after the fact—with what I’d been attempting in my more modest project, Videotape, from which the four clips printed here are taken. A video isn’t a photo, of course, but my manuscript, which started by engaging moving pictures—the spectacle’s articulation over time—finished in fascination to the still, where temporality is neutralized between past and future.

The notion of errancy, or movement without determinate direction—against the grain of the camera’s so-called objectif—has informed the poetry I’ve written over the past decade, dis/oriented as it’s been between Australia and Scotland, the former Yugoslavia and Vietnam, between high-rise cosmopolitan centers and post-industrial backwaters, even as those would-be poles are increasingly diluted to interstice as such. Now that I’ve got a steady job, my travels are limited to what Depardon calls l’errance occasionnelle—and, because I have a credit card, l’errance moderne. The impulse to go out and get lost remains constant, though, and I supplement my stasis, two-thirds of the year, with an interest in virtual voyaging, as well as in the media that make such prosthetic journeys possible, if not mildly pathetic. As the present clips reveal, Videotape is shot on location in South Jersey, London, Avignon, Buffalo, but its viewfinder is also trained on sites spanning Brixton to Chamonix, Tokyo to Bamako. This grafting of once particular places, the collapse and flattening of discrete locales by the hegemonic capitalist imperative, participates in what I think of as “global pastoral.” While that phrase might have been oxymoronic a few decades ago, it’s certainly available now, as the concepts of “here” and “there” are emptied out.

Before setting off, Depardon established several loose constraints, as filter for the flow. His photos are always vertical, to distinguish them from film—of which he’s likewise a practitioner—and, I gather, from traditional landscape painting. He wants his images to emulate doors, corridors. Moreover, the horizon line invariably appears in the exact middle of his photos—like a Rothko tableau, say, or a seascape by Sugimoto—even though this usually means too much ground, too much sky visible. This central axis attests, each time, to where he’s standing—on this planet, at that specific spot, in an unswerving bodily pose. Such spirit-leveling requires dissension elsewhere within the image, some zigzag or crosscurrent or counter vector, to keep the picture from resolving into binaries. Akin to the 6x9 format that he espouses, the dual Track A in Videotape features vertical, full-justified segments of 2.25” width: paysage as passage. The quatrains comprising my bifurcated Track B, beyond concretely mimicking the layout of videotape, aspire to Depardon’s horizontal, materialist discipline.

A trained reporter and documentarian, Depardon tries to act as a witness, alert to the inadvertent and incidental, as if his photos might be objective. He finds instead he’s a stage director, involved in arranging scenes. If the only one not apparent within the frame is the person behind the camera, that absence doesn’t imply that he’s not there—to the contrary. The wizard of Oz and Maelzel’s chess player, Jean-Luc Godard, Godot, maybe God himself, are all ghosts inside a machine that, in turn, prove mechanics. The frame is never innocent, because framing never is; one way an image seeks to occlude its guilt is by hiding the imagination behind it.

Finally, I’m attracted by Depardon’s elective association with the earliest era of “light-writing.” Due to protracted exposure times, photographers in the nineteenth century often excluded people from their compositions, or included only figures far away: the closer to the camera, the more likely they’d blur. To the degree that humans were rarely the subject, then, let alone a photographic “object,” an ethics inhered in that discretion, before the era of Simone Weil (quoted in one of my poems here), let alone that of Judith Butler, about refusing to convert the other to the same, avoiding slurring someone’s singularity. That respect is fundamental to my idea of art. Depardon shoots from twenty to thirty meters, a span he labels “énorme,” and my poems tend to maintain a similar remove. “Chacun a son distance.”

 

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