Rebecca Norris Webb, Blackbirds, 2006, color photograph. From the series “My Dakota,” 2005–2011.
A few weeks before the end of 2014, Aaron Stern and Jordan Sullivan wrote me to request permission to reprint the poem “My Gift to You,” by Roberto Bolaño, which was published in our Summer 2012 issue. Stern and Jordan, both of whom are photographers, had recently opened a small space called 205-A in which they hosted group photography exhibitions with the aim of creating an artistic community in dialogue. They had also begun publishing small-run books; “My Gift to You” was intended for a book pairing images by nine photographers with the work of nine poets. Titled 36 Photographs & 20 Poems, the slim volume is published under the heading Dialogues 01, indicating future installments in a series.
The book appeared in limited quantity in 2015. Its dimensions are slightly smaller than those of the Review, and its pale pink covers are unassuming: with only the title and a white rectangle on the front, suggesting an empty frame, it has the austerity of a classic Éditions Grasset cover. Stern, who lives in New York, spoke with me in person; I corresponded with Sullivan, who resides in Los Angeles, over e-mail. The assembled conversation returns again and again to the linked ideas of collaboration, correspondence, and correspondences.
INTERVIEWER
The epigraph is from Arseny Tarkovsky’s “On the Bank,” a sublime and foreboding poem about the natural world. The book’s opening photograph, by Rebecca Norris-Webb, depicts an army of brown, bowing sunflowers and a plague of birds and echoes Tarkovsky’s line about “the terrible, vegetable sense of self.” Why did you choose to begin this way?
SULLIVAN
The poem explores the moment when one realizes nature has a language, though that language is incomprehensible. This realization makes the world both troubling and beautiful, and perhaps the world made more sense to him before he was able to contemplate it, before he was fully conscious, before he “counted life in years.” This narrative speaks to this large cosmic complexity, and I think it makes for a nice ground from which the rest of the poems and pictures in the book can grow. Essentially, this book is an exploration of the world at large. There isn’t a concrete thesis or message we’re trying to convey. We were more interested in presenting poems and images we found interesting and organizing them in a way where meaning could be generated from their interaction. Whatever that meaning is, it will be different for each person.
What was the initial impetus for the book?
STERN
I read a poem by David Wagoner in The New Yorker in 2010, “Following a Stream.” It reminded me of someone I had a tumultuous relationship with and also of my process in making the photographs for I Woke Up in My Clothes, where I spent a lot of time in the car driving aimlessly, waiting for the light to be right. I found David’s poem at a time when I felt very lost, and the transition at the beginning of the poem from “Don’t do it, the guidebook says, / if you’re lost” to “Then it goes on / to talk about something else, / taking the easy way out, / which of course is what water does / as a matter of course always” lifted the cloud I had hovering above me.
It took me about six months, but I tracked him down and asked him if could I use his poem in my book, and he said yes. At the time, he was about eighty-five, and he wrote me back in five minutes. Most people take days to write back over e-mail, and here’s a pretty famous poet in his mideighties writing me back right away. And we have written each other ever since. His e-mails are poetic.
What have you and he corresponded about?
Life, everything. When the book was published, there was a small show and a dinner and it all felt really good. But then the moment was over—the book’s done, it’s out, you’ve celebrated, people have written about it, it’s sold, but then it’s gone. It’s a project you’ve worked on for a number of years and agonized over, and now you feel a little deflated. I told David what I was feeling, and he wrote me something that blew me away. He told me that when he was in his early twenties, he asked the English poet Stephen Spender if he were marooned on a desert island would he still write? And Spender said no. David said he would, even if he had to do it with sand and a stick. He said he’d published thirty-two books, but sometimes it has felt like mailing postcards over a cliff. That made me feel okay. It’s sad but comforting to hear that. I picked myself up and started reading more of his work and more of other people’s work, and that led me to want to include more poetry in my books.
A spread from the book, showing Aaron Stern’s Polaroid & Transfer, Los Angeles, 2013.
How did the other poets come to be included?
I met Will Schutt—he’s a family friend of a good friend of mine—and told him about David. Will introduced us to Tom Sleigh for the last book we did, A Form of Love, which was a book of war photography. Tom gave us a poem for it. And the four of us—Tom, Will, Jordan, and me—corresponded about this idea of pairing poems and photographs, and Tom and Will loved it and agreed to help pick poems and get other people involved. We all sent things back and forth over e-mail—we sent them photos, they sent us poems. I would not have discovered Alan Shapiro, Michael Collier, or Rose McLarney without Will and Tom’s help.
David introduced us to some wonderful poets, and it was a chain reaction from there. Of course there were other poems, like the Bolaño one, that we just knew had to be in there somehow.
Was there a guiding principle in determining which photographs would go with which poems?
David’s went with mine because of our relationship. A lot of the book came together because of coincidence. For instance, when I told Tom about who we had picked photography-wise, he said, That’s amazing, because I spoke at Alex Webb’s father’s funeral—I knew him well and I know Rebecca and Alex. Rebecca felt strongly about being paired with Tom, and their work goes well together. That kind of connection is difficult to plan out.
The process was intuitive, testing the chemistry of two different artists, putting this with that and seeing what happens. Some of the poems and pictures work together on a literal level, and others contrast. It was a lot of trial and error, and also working with the poems and photographs available to us. We are a small press, so resources are limited.
Alex Webb, San Ysidro, California, 1979, color photograph.
There’s a wonderful tension between Alex Webb’s photograph of two Hispanic men, possibly immigrants, being arrested in a paradasiacal field and Will Schutt’s poem about being tongue-tied in the paradise that wealth produces or that wealth evokes.
The poem immediately reminded me of a David Wagoner poem called “Under Arrest.” It was published in The Paris Review. We didn’t use it, but it helped with the process and it’s what made me want to include Alex’s work. David said he used to do some local reporting about crime and court cases, and that’s what gave him the idea for the poem. I remember part of it by heart—
It means stand still. It means stay just as sweet as you are and where you are and don’t do anything you were doing before or might have planned to do or be anywhere else you might have in mind and you’re wrong and have lost your chance to keep your hands to yourself as long as it may please the court or its officers who have their eyes on you and all yours.
I saw Alex’s photograph of the two Mexicans being arrested while trying to cross the border, arms raised in the air in a beautiful field of flowers, helicopter hovering in the background—and immediately thought of David’s poem. It was too literal for the book, but it sparked something and energized our concept.
Were you hoping to produce certain resonances between the poetry and the photographs?
We wanted them to illuminate each other, and I also designed the book so that the pictures and poems are sort of drifting off the page—not much is centered—and I left a lot of white space around the elements. In that way, the poems and pictures become destinations, and the book is a kind of atlas. It’s a world, this world, and it’s at once beautiful, mysterious, dark, and troublesome.
Ed van der Elsken, from Love on the Left Bank, 1956.
The Van der Elsken photographs of the couples kissing, which close the book, are the most straightforward and perhaps the most readily narrative. They stand out from the other work in that way. Do feel there’s a difference?
The book needed a literal and touching element like the Van der Elsken to punctuate it. As complex as life is, at the end of the day hopefully we can all find that moment of love and passion, which that picture captures. Also, selfishly, I love Ed van der Elsken, so I just really wanted him in this book. I particularly love the book that last picture came from, Love on the Left Bank, which also explores the intersection of text, narrative fiction, and photography.
And you put it with Bolaño’s poem “My Gift to You.”
We got a selection of Van der Elsken photos and that poem at the end of the process, and they really felt like they fit together. You know those relationships where they don’t work out because they’re so intense, they crash and burn, and maybe it’s a month, maybe it’s two years, but they’re fiery? That Bolaño poem made me think of that kind of relationship. “My gift to you will be an abyss”—the poem’s a little mean, but beautiful.
Did you want to limit the length and size of the book?
Jordan wanted it to feel physically like a small book of poetry. There’s a French publisher, Centre National de la Photographie, that has a series photography books called Photo Poche that were about this size—Lee Friedlander, Daidō Moriyama, Josef Koudelka. They were the kind of photography book you could take on the subway. Jordan and I both had those books in mind—we said it at the same time.
It’s more intimate than a coffee-table book.
And less pressure. If you go into Dashwood and pick up an Alex Webb book, which’ll probably be $250, or a Josef Koudelka book, which would also be expensive, you want to turn the pages delicately. I think that’s why Jordan picked uncoated, off-white paper that has some tooth to it—it felt more like a novel, something accessible, which is what we wanted. The format we chose makes it easier to get into.
Photograph by Jordan Sullivan.
Did the title come after you’d completed the book?
Yes, Dialogues came after we had finished. We really wanted to leave the project untitled. We knew we would be making more volumes of poetry-photo books, so we wanted a title that could act as umbrella for the whole project.
On what level, or in what way, do you imagine the photographs and poems are in dialogue?
People ask me to explain my photographs, and it’s really hard to do. I don’t want to write a statement about my work because I want people to look at the images and just feel something. When you hear a song, you might think of your own life, even though the songwriter is probably writing about something completely different, but you apply it to yourself, and I think it’s similar with photos. The images are trying to tell a narrative, and Jordan and I want people to interpret them their own way. Poetry can help do this in a way a statement can’t.
If you read a poem then look at the picture next to it, the poem might change, and vice versa. They inform each other, they contradict each other. The dialogue between the elements in this book form an argument, which points to a larger dilemma. The book stresses the importance not only of photography and poetry in our lives but the importance of looking at the world, reading the world, arguing with the world, figuring out your position in the world, which is undoubtedly unique, and asking yourself, What is this life?
Nicole Rudick is the managing editor of The Paris Review.
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