Supersnapshots: On Poetry and Photography

In this essay, Kiana Rezakhanlou takes up poems by Thom Gunn, Robert Lowell and James Schuyler to consider the relationship between poetry and photography: what they have in common, what makes them different, and how they can complement one another within the pages of a single book. Might poetry be a genre of aura-preservation? Do all ekphrastic poems inevitably – necessarily – spill beyond the frame of the painting or photograph that inspires them? Should poetry pursue the visual or the emotional or something in between? Kiana explores these questions, and more, in what is a fascinating reflection on the capacity of language to capture, contain and commemorate experience. I hope you enjoy it.

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I.

In his essay ‘Writing a Poem’ (1973), Thom Gunn makes an image – or rather, describes the experience of seeing an image – of a young, naked family he encounters on his way to the Ocean Beach, in San Francisco: 

Then one day I was walking on a hill going down to the Pacific, which it met at a narrow, partly-sheltered beach. I came to the beach from some bushes and was confronted by a naked family – father, mother, and son. The son rushed up to me very excited, shouting ‘hi there, hi there’ in his shrill voice, and rushed away without waiting for an answer. I walked off and felt happy about the comeliness of the scene: it had, too, a kind of decorum that made my mind return to it several times in the next few hours. I mentioned it to some friends that evening and to others the next day, and the day after that I realized that I wanted to write a poem about the naked family. I didn’t know any more than that I wanted to preserve them on paper in the best way I knew, as a kind of supersnapshot, getting my feeling for them into my description of them.

The group of three catch the poet unawares, but the scene – and, crucially for Gunn, its ‘comeliness’ and ‘decorum’ – lingers in his mind, so much so that he longs to capture a ‘supersnapshot’ of this family. That is, to ‘preserve [them] on paper’. So, despite its name, this sought-after ‘supersnapshot’ has nothing to do with the camera, but with the pen. Only through poetry, Gunn suggests, can he get his ‘feeling for them’ into his description: 

When I saw the naked family I didn’t know why they satisfied me so much, why I had that strange sense of what I have called decorum. Certainly their appearance was more than a pat embodiment of innocence and its repossession, though as I have said I have come to realize that they were that too. But I did know that I had certain clear and strong feelings about them that I wanted to preserve, if possible by preserving the experience that elicited them. When I came to write the poem, it was all-important that I should be true to those feelings – even, paradoxically, at the risk of distorting the experience. And so for me the act of writing is an exploration, a reaching out, an act of trusting search for the correct incantation that will return me certain feelings whenever I want them.

As Gunn continues, it becomes apparent that, for him, the allegiance a poem holds is not to visual images, nor ultimately to external realia, but to the intense feelings elicited by an experience; its calling is to create the alphabetic imprint of those very feelings which thickly hang up in the mind’s cerebral recesses. Poetry’s force comes, Gunn suggests, from reaching above and beyond the unmagical glare of photography – here is a super-snapshot indeed. The poet Kit Fan (in his York doctoral thesis on Gunn) calls the encounter an ‘almost photographic epiphany’ (2007:73), but is it not just as readily anti-photographic, or indeed more-than-photographic? 

Gunn did, in fact, turn this experience into a poem, titled ‘Three’ – a ‘very cowardly’ title, by his own admission, ‘just as bad [as when] poems are called “Poem”’; he also considered the name ‘The Holy Family’, though this brought with it ‘complications [he] did not intend’. The final two stanzas go as follows: 

True, Gunn’s poem reproduces some of this particular situation’s particular facts: the child’s ‘Hi there hi there’, for instance. But the poem also goes beyond pure reproduction. It is only at the point of versification that we are treated to the nude couple’s parental outlook (‘At watch’), and to their child’s ludic, and then not-so-ludic, journey through and out of innocence and towards ‘that pebble-warmed recess’ made by his parents’ bodies. It is only through ‘reaching out’, and the ‘act of trusting search’, that we end up at Gunn’s bold musing on sexuality in the final line (‘who had to learn their nakedness’). And it is only through the stanza form that the ‘flex and pull’ – as Stephanie Burt (1999) puts it – of the boy’s energy can enjoy full force.

‘To pry an object from its shell, to destroy its Aura, is the mark of a perception whose “sense of the universal equality of things” has increased to such a degree that it extracts it even from a unique object by means of reproduction.’ This is how Walter Benjamin describes the destructive force of reproduction (Reproduzierbarkeit) in his famous account of aura, that ‘unique phenomenon of distance, however close it may be’, in the essay The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction. Aura is particularised and localised, to a viewer, to a place, to a point in time. The branch – to use an example of Benjamin’s – which is perceived on a certain summer’s afternoon, has a specific aura which you, on whom it casts a distinct shadow, alone have experienced. But this occurrence of distance is, in Benjamin’s essayistic narrative, increasingly threatened by processes of flattening: the ‘desire of contemporary masses to bring things “closer”’ (näherzubringen) and their ‘bent (Tendenz) towards overcoming the uniqueness of every reality’. 

Poetry – to extend Gunn’s account – acts as a form of shelter: not ‘prying’ an object or experience from its shell, but actually containing it. By refusing sheer reproduction and searching for something beyond ‘pat embodiment’, Gunn seems to assert poetry’s power to maintain this particular experience’s ‘aura’ or uniqueness. In the poem, the shell and its contents can be returned to, but in special – even deviant – form. This is not the normative shutter of the camera, the un-incantational ‘close-up’ of possessive reproduction. This is a unique representation which, in shying away from what film theorist Tom Gunning calls the photographic ‘truth claim’, stays true to something greater.

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II.

Yet why not say what happened? ‘Epilogue’, a poem which first appeared in Robert Lowell’s final book, Day By Day (1977), performs both a meditation on his all-baring poetic approach and an honest inquiry into its (mis)affordances. How could poetry, especially the kind which deals exactly in ‘what happened’, be truly ‘blessèd’? The answer, Lowell’s poem seems to conjecture, might be found in another artistic dichotomy. While painting, exemplified by the Dutch Golden Age, ‘caresses the light’, the photographic lens is ‘paralyzed by fact’, as if in a crisis of creativity. One wonders what Lowell would make of Photoshop and softwares of its ilk, of the ‘digital revolution’ in which the photograph can journey far beyond its original state and ‘aspire to the condition of painting’, as Gunning writes, with any given ‘colour, shape, and texture’ up for transformational grabs. 

Which route should poetry follow? At first glance, it seems that we may have something of a super-snapshot in photography – ‘heightened from life’ – but Lowell seems unwilling to settle for this: these snapshots are ‘heightened’, but the eye’s art is still ‘threadbare’ and its products, Lowell says, are ‘lurid’ and ‘garish’. Much hangs on Lowell’s frustration at not being able to put in verse the ‘imagined’, left only with the ‘recalled’ – and therefore, arguably, the biographical. Lowell seems to be suggesting that the confessional turn in poetry has pushed truth to its ‘lurid, rapid, garish’ limits, unable to meaningfully move past what the poet, whose techne has become a surficial ‘art of the eye’, physically sees right in front of him. In a Vermeer, light has grace, it dances with fancy; this is a painting brimming with desire both human and natural, close and far away. But the photograph? Its light is but the mere product of camera shutters.

And yet, an imperative steals the show: ‘Pray for the grace of accuracy’. In Lowell’s soft comment on Vermeer, one feels the emergence of a greater point: it is precisely accuracy by which the painter gives sunlight such playful, emotional movement, ‘stealing like a tide across a map’. Accuracy, Lowell suggests, need not be seen as antithetical to the powers of art. Indeed, a poem like Lowell’s ‘My Father’s Bedroom’ attests to the power of ‘the eye’ – particularly a specific eye like Lowell’s – to create monuments of and to memory: 

This is not the ‘lurid, rapid, garish’ sort of snapshot that Lowell’s ‘Epilogue’ condemns. If we are but ‘poor passing facts’ (a phrase in which Huck Gutman (2022) hears echoes of Macbeth Act V, Scene V, 24-28), then we should be grateful for this sort of graceful accuracy: how close it gets to reality, how doggedly possessive it becomes over its own vision. How else could we give photographic figures a ‘living’ name? How else could Lowell simultaneously elegize and infantilize his Boston Brahmin father posthumously, if not with a camera zoom-in on his copy of Lafcadio Hearn’s Glimpses of Unfamiliar Japan?

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III.

What if photography gave way to a poem? Published in 1974’s Hymn to Life, James Schuyler’s ‘A photograph’ (the opening and closing of which is quoted above), we see how poetry does not always have to excuse, or justify, its photographic inclinations, even origins. 

‘A photograph’ starts with the image of Robert Jordan, Schuyler’s lover, one which is somewhat geographically specific and hopelessly vague in the same breath (‘in a London / room: books, a painting’). The poem is ‘of’ or ‘after’ a photograph, but also gives up its act of reproduction early on. ‘And more’ nods to the endless condition that description of visual phenomena finds itself in: much like how the man of the photograph has a life beyond the frame, Schuyler’s poem could feasibly go on forever. And though the image may not be Jordan himself, its representation does not go unnoticed, or unappreciated: here is an image which ‘looks so like’ him that Schyler keeps it on his desk, grateful for its near-accuracy, its attempt at (not-quite-there) presence. So, there is something powerful in the photograph, if only as a prompt or ekphrastic starting-point for the poem that follows. 

As we continue in ‘A photograph’, the photograph disappears from view, as Schuyler verbally bounces off it to discuss the couple’s electrifying weekend out: ‘Last / Friday was grand’ is our first indication that the poem will move outside the image’s frame, above and beyond both its temporal and ‘physical’ limits. Here is an ekphrasis which wrestles with the interplay between poetry and photography, unafraid to allow the former to use, and then leave behind, the latter. Poetry is precisely what redirects the photograph’s (lack of) aura to create a supersnapshot: the reproduced image, ending at its four corners, leads not to a flattened narrative, but ultimately provokes this higher, or deeper, representation-in-verse of Jordan, his human activities and relations, 

There is also the question of queer time and time-to-come,  the hopeful gesture Schuyler makes towards a world in which ‘future generations can / live without the in- / tervals of anxious / fear we know’. The very ‘frozen temporality’ of the photograph, its momentariness, is what engenders the poem’s temporal journey. That is, reproduction gives way to an aspirational imagination, one which wonders whether the repeated, like-clockwork acts Schuyler and his partner experience (‘our / bouts and strolls of / ecstasy’) will open up to an unbound, unrepetitively (even un-anxious) future. Whether one reads in the poem a genuine optimism (à la Muñoz’s Cruising Utopia) or a tamer ambivalence and contradiction (as Brian Glavey (2020) does), it is the photograph coming first (and before the poem) which allows this stance to be articulated at all: it is the photographic permanence of Jordan’s snapped happiness (‘You / smile some years back / in London’) that prompts the imagined future Schuyler muses on, where queer joy is indeed enduring, where intervals of fear are unnecessary. The poet situates Jordan’s cheerful expression in the past, ‘some years back’, but implies its possible occurrence in the present tense also. Even smiling ‘some years in the future’ is conceivable, too.

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IV.

A few years after penning ‘Writing an Essay’, Gunn would – unsurprisingly – write another. In 1979’s ‘My Life Up to Now’, tracing his textured career, he stops at an anomalous point: the book Positives (1966), his only collaboration, done with his brother Ander. Where Ander contributed images, Thom supplied words, and so they depicted Londoners – young, old, and the in between – in two-step: photograph here, poem there. On this side-by-side positioning, Gunn would later write:

I was never very sure whether what I was writing opposite the photographs were poems or captions – they were somewhere in between the two, I suspect – but that didn’t matter, because what I was looking for was a form of fragmentary inclusiveness that could embody the detail and history of that good year. […] I enjoyed working on the book, it contains a London I found hard to recognize only eight years later.

Gunn’s earlier essay had suggested the need to ‘distort’ the facts of an experience in order to capture the ‘feelings’ to which it gave rise. ‘Supersnapshot’ – crucially not ‘snapshot’, that mere photographic reproduction – was the artistic goal. Here, though, reflecting on photography against (not quite?) poetry, Gunn acknowledges the ability of the two to work together; in so doing, they engender a return to the original experience, to a capital city which has changed in the last eight years. Positives is thus, a decade or so on, a portal back to the cliff-like Marble Arch Odeon (‘black above the traffic’), to the leopard-skin-seat scooterist, the hop-picking elderly woman for whom he summons ‘the terror of full repose’ in verse. Gunn’s poetic take on one glamourous woman – photographed eating cake, sat beside three others in a café window – assumes her voice (Positives 64):

You have no idea what a
hard life a rich person leads.

What with servants and jewels,
and having to go to Harrods
every day so as to
purchase a big article
and help use up the imports.

It’s quite a relief sometimes
to sit down for a while with
an espresso and a tiny slice
of expensive cake.

You have no idea, either,
how hard it is
seeming to lead such a life.

By contrast, Gunn’s commentary on a faceless woman on the go, her laundry basket posed on her head, and with milk bottles by her side, takes another (lyrical ‘I’) tune (Positives 38):

The poems, here, provide the inner life – the personal stories, thoughts and feelings – that the photographs can only hint at. In both poems, there is an embodiment which, surely, aims for more than the ‘pat’ sort of ‘embodiment’ that Gunn rejected when writing about the ‘holy family’ in San Francisco. From Archie’s to Harrods, ‘a big / tea’ to ‘a tiny slice / of expensive cake’: the very fragmentary precision at play in Positives might not get to incantational heights, but its exact(ing) representation is nevertheless worthy and worthwhile. Straddling between the caption indebted to the photograph and the untethered position of the poem, Gunn’s ‘mongrel’ (an adjective M.C. Caseley uses in his impassioned defence of Positives) written offering is a monumental, and diverse, ode to the capital city, the home to which he briefly returned after much time away: here is a London, a year, encased in amber.

One of Positives’ most touching poems – set opposite the photo of a young girl dressed in her Sunday best, slumped in a wooden chair but her feet dangling – ends thus: ‘In a bus it is nice to ride on top because / it looks like running people over.’ Coy, charming, humorously innocent, what occurs here, if not poetry giving the photographic figure its ‘living name’?

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Kiana Rezakhanlou is a doctoral student from London, now based in Basel, where she researches ancient literary criticism, and attempts to write its modern equivalent. Her essays have appeared in minor lit[s], Wilderness House Literary Review, and The Oxford Review of Books, among others.