Observing and imagining are two ways of
seeing. After the photographer discovers a subject, there are choices to
be made. What we see is created through the artist’s sensitivity and
judgment. Our growing emotional investment in the image before us is
influenced by the subtle, artistic choices by which the picture was
created.
Poetry, like photography, is about these two ways of seeing. Each poem
in this collection was initiated by some part or all of the photograph it
sits beside. The observed subject becomes a point of departure. The poet,
using the tools of an ancient craft, pursues a feeling, a memory, a lesson
learned until a poem emerges.
In coupling these photographs and poems we are proposing a synergy of
artistic imagination. The poems are not meant to explain the photographs,
nor do the photographs intentionally illustrate the poems. Something
additional to both, we believe, emerges when the two art forms play off
one another. From their intimate placement on the page a conversation
begins between the visual and the written images which we trust you, our
viewer-reader, will be drawn into. What you may see or say as a
consequence of experiencing these paired creations will be a contribution
that goes beyond what we have made and presented.
Both of us are at home in the temperate, deciduous forest. A number of
the photographs in Another Light are of scenes in the Great Smoky Mountain
National Park, an area we as visitors find both visually rich and
emotionally fulfilling. There in a single day, moving up and down the high
mountains, one can pass from one season into another. And thanks to
preservation efforts, old times exist there inside the present.
But New England is where we live. We know its wild places, its back
roads, its people and their season-dictated activities. Here we find
subjects for pictures and poems every day.
Light is the theme of this collection. The photographs are products of
light, many of the poems employ images of light, and we are reaching you
through the miracle of the eye. But it is another light we celebrate here,
that light by which we all can imagine the world.
