Images In Between Images
Artist
During the creative process of writing my last book, I explored working with photographs as points of departure, arrival, or orbit. Photographs are something outside of ourselves, they are material, something to hold onto to keep going. I’m interested in thinking about the space of the page, and what effects and affects are set in motion by bringing together image and text, or image and image and then text. Like Godard on film, I like to think about writing as a thing between things.
Silvina López Medin was born in Buenos Aires and earned an MFA in Creative Writing from New York University. Her books of poetry include La noche de los bueyes (1999), winner of the Loewe Foundation International Young Poetry Prize; That Salt on the Tongue to Say Mangrove (trans. Jasmine V. Bailey, 2021); 62 brazadas (2015); and the chapbook Excursion (2020), which was selected by Mary Jo Bang as the winner of the Oversound Chapbook Prize in 2020. Medin's hybrid poetry book Poem That Never Ends (2021) was a winner of the Essay Press/University of Washington Bothell Contest. Medin lives in Croton on Hudson, New York, and serves as an editor at Ugly Duckling Presse, and teaches poetry at Pratt Institute and in the Creative Writing in Spanish MFA at NYU.
silvinalopezmedin.com
Silvina López Medin
Choose two images you feel some connection with, but that are disconnected from each other.
Invitation
Choose two photographs (or any images) you feel some connection with, but that are somehow disconnected between themselves (in terms of medium, theme, or time).
Take notes in your notebook observing only one of the photographs: What do you see/hear/smell/taste/touch? What specific detail do you go back to? What do you not see? When do you stop looking? What reverberates when you close your eyes? What memory or desire not necessarily connected to the photo is sparked by the photo?
Repeat the exploratory process with the second photograph.
Put the two photographs side by side. Observe how they are transformed by being together. For instance, is there continuity and/or disruption? Does one open or close the other? In which ways do they attract or repel or imbue each other?
Make note of images that emerge between the two photographs.