Carol
I was raised in southern California where I spent as much time as I could hiking in the chaparral, foothills and mountains, and walking and running the beaches in all seasons. Since then, I’ve been fortunate to live in various parts of the world, but no matter where I’ve lived, I explore afoot with eye and camera what these different countries and cultures offer an outside observer in terms of nature, history, art, and architecture. Observing those worlds as closely as I’m able has also been complemented by decades of meditation and yoga practice.
When taking photos, I do my best to be thoughtful and respectful as I select, compose, and shoot. It’s very important to me that I honor the identity and integrity of the objects I photograph no matter how large or small. My aim is always to try to see and record whatever I’m photographing as it is, on its own terms, its ‘essence’ so to speak, as far as that is humanly possible. By photographing the beauty and fragility of objects past and present and sharing their precious qualities with others, I hope in some small way to honor the wonders that exist during my brief moment in time.
Jim
I spent my outdoor teenage years in northern California biking and camping in the foothills, hills, coastal beaches, and inland mountains, and traveling by thumb. Indoors I dashed off youthful thoughts and feelings in the margins of paperbacks and on a tiny Royal typewriter with sticky keys and a faint “o.” As a student, history, literature, and art became an intriguing, then inspirational threesome for me, which I had the great good fortune of sharing with students as a teacher. A chief aim in the classroom was to focus on relationships between our natural and human-made and -shaped worlds to offer an overview of life that both moves us to live as best we can lives of understanding and compassion and requires us to deal with its dark, often tragic, truths.
I think of my poems as lyrics more than narratives, snapshots more than films, though many suggest stories that precede what happens in a poem or comes after it. I’d like them to be heard as welcoming invitations in a voice that speaks clearly and slowly. No blasts of sound or light show of images. Varieties in form complement varieties of subject. They’re light on self-reference, heavy on attention to natural objects and human activities. As reflections, they reflect on what caught my eye, ear, curiosity and pricked me to try to understand more deeply my feelings and thoughts about what I observed or read. All are learning experiences to share with others who might have an interest. Every poem provisional to challenge the desperation in certainty.
Collaboration
We began putting photos and poems together—what we call “Photo-Poems”—at a residency in southwestern Washington. From the first experiments our efforts were a cooperative give, take, adjust, and accommodate as we explored complementary and contrasting relationships between the mediums in respect to objects, subjects, images, compositions, styles, techniques. This process of interplay was exciting as we continually fed off the inquisitiveness of each other. It was also enlivening because always an open, experimental learning experience—close attention, thoughtful selection, reflection, reconsideration, care being the chief guides. Some of the pairings are easily recognizable illustrations, others suggestive, still others intentionally puzzling in order to provoke thought. Sometimes the same object or subject would catch our attention, but more frequently a poem would catch Carol’s attention and off she’d go off with camera to find a mate for it, or a photo would catch Jim’s eye and he’d tickle keys to make a poem for it. Sometimes photo and poem came together on the page quickly, miraculously. Sometimes what seemed a pair of misfits ended up being surprisingly fit. Sometimes no pairs worked. Often photos needed retaking to have room for the poem, or poems needed adjusting—usually cutting—so that they fit comfortably in a photo. Best of all was sitting down together in front of the computer making/ designing/ composing the prints and making decisions about placement of text, spacing, font type, size and color. If all went acceptably well, the result would touch the viewer/reader in thoughtful and emotional ways.
The last several years we’ve presented paired photos and poems side-by-side. The dynamic of interplay is still there along with the give, take, adjust, accommodate, shape and reshape, but there is more flexibility and freedom for both of us to not have photo and poem locked in a single frame. Right now, visual and verbal variety presented within thematic flows of sequence has become important as we picture the works on walls and in books. The photo-poems in presentations had the advantage of allowing the audience to not only see the image, but read along with the heard voice. By comparison, we hope our present work requires an audience to listen more carefully and look more attentively at the paired photo while hearing the read poem. Exhibitions and books, of course, allow viewer-readers to relook and reread as often as they like, and, of course, they often share discoveries about the pairings that we never intended. This, in turn, keeps us open and inquisitive about new possibilities of seeing and writing about our natural and human worlds, especially their limitless variety and the innumerable active and reactive relationships between them.