Spring Break
Forced Into Photography By Metaphor or To Free (At Last) All Framed Blackness
A Photo Essay, Interview by Stephen Pasqualina
Thomas Sayers Ellis, Sarah Lawrence College
Issue date: 1/16/08 Section: Fall 2007
Two minutes later, he turned over, slowly, faced down in the water, whoa! And we all just sat there for a few seconds: me, the tourists, the other people eating in the park. That's when I went into the water and began to shout at him, "What's wrong, get up!" I even kicked him. I had one camera in my hand, the digital Leica, and I couldn't bring myself to photograph him, but I wanted to, and, by then, the guy in the uniform in the photos was approaching us. I ran back to the bench to get my cell phone to call for help, and on the way back to them I began shooting, alternating the Digilux 2 and the SLR. I had to. I hated to, but I had to. And later, the medics and detectives thanked me for recording the incident. The photos, they said, helped them understand what had happened. I felt a little good and a lot bad. I still do. I haven't even developed the photos I shot with the SLR, not yet. I need some distance.
SP: What relations do you draw between your poetry and your photography? How do they work together in your craft?
TSE: My poems (and poetry) "feed" my photography and my photography "eats" my poetry. It's essential, well, was essential for me to find my own way to make both imagery and metaphor. I hope I do that differently than the other poets of my generation; I really wish that I didn't need them (metaphor and simile) at all, but I do-for now, and both poetry and photography have been the right mentors in that aspect of my apprenticeship. The true thing, the craft, that I am learning hasn't been discovered (by me) yet. Both poetry and photography feel like practice for a greater unknown. They both extend and complete me, as well as reinvent me. The poem, so desirous of imagery; the photo, so desirous of metaphor. I love the meeting place, forced and unforced, known and unknown. I don't privilege either object or either energy, but poems are mostly made inside of me and photographs are mostly made outside of me. How to change that, how to trick them into behaving like one another without Photoshop or a rhyming dictionary. Both processes, the way they give reality a failed new representation, a wrong thinking, feeling and seeing. In this way, both re-imagine reality-and this re-imagining is the first act of all art, change and revolution.
SP: What relations do you draw between your poetry and your photography? How do they work together in your craft?
TSE: My poems (and poetry) "feed" my photography and my photography "eats" my poetry. It's essential, well, was essential for me to find my own way to make both imagery and metaphor. I hope I do that differently than the other poets of my generation; I really wish that I didn't need them (metaphor and simile) at all, but I do-for now, and both poetry and photography have been the right mentors in that aspect of my apprenticeship. The true thing, the craft, that I am learning hasn't been discovered (by me) yet. Both poetry and photography feel like practice for a greater unknown. They both extend and complete me, as well as reinvent me. The poem, so desirous of imagery; the photo, so desirous of metaphor. I love the meeting place, forced and unforced, known and unknown. I don't privilege either object or either energy, but poems are mostly made inside of me and photographs are mostly made outside of me. How to change that, how to trick them into behaving like one another without Photoshop or a rhyming dictionary. Both processes, the way they give reality a failed new representation, a wrong thinking, feeling and seeing. In this way, both re-imagine reality-and this re-imagining is the first act of all art, change and revolution.
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