Porkbelly
Press, 2018
The photographs overall are quite
dark; a black background unifies the images, and darkness is one bold method of
coherence. The cover stock and end sheets of Light Experiments are black.
The first photograph in the book is about 80% black; it depicts two trailing
pale arms in the lower right corner (the dark-shirted figure is running off the
page), one hand holding a sparkler dropping matchsticks of light along the
bottom edge of the page. The rest of the page is darkness. The darkness overall
is cleverly cohesive, and the presentational choices by the poet and publisher
make this chapbook into not just a collection of images, but rather a
beautifully produced art object that we want to spend more time with.
The other theme of this chapbook is,
of course, light. As we turn Barnes’s pages, we encounter light in traces,
zigs, spirals, flashes, waves, circles, and webs. As in the initial image, we
find the lit or shadowed body also on these pages, but these forms are
frequently obscured or cut off. We glimpse lit up arms, faces, necks, ankles,
or even the glowing outline of the darkened body. We also see shadowed sections
of bodies – a torso; or a torso and arms; a torso, arms, and head; or upreached
arms. In some photographs, like on the pages that “depict a young woman in a
shimmering dress” (as noted on the “acknowledgements” page), the human forms
here must be actively sought out. Reading Light Experiments, our eyes
first encounter darkness, then light, then the body.
Barnes writes, in the “artist
statement,” “I experimented with light…to evoke the same energy and sensations
that language-based poetry might,” and I agree that she accomplishes this in Light
Experiments. As a reader, I found it very pleasurable to turn the pages and
look for links between images, movements and textures of light. Barnes’s
manipulations of light, using “matches, sparklers, moonlight, sequins, timers,
apertures, flash, motion, layers…” evokes a kind of written language. In a
photograph taken in what appears to be a park at night, readers can imagine the
overlapping and developing ideas of a poem while looking at the circles and
arcs crisscrossing the left side of the page; we trace the lines of light as
they thicken and bend, as they echo off into the darkness of the grass behind.
We are invited to imagine locations, movements, stories behind the foregrounded
light traces. This activity, looking slowly and carefully beyond what is
highlighted, feels much like reading a poem.
While the photographic pages most
often read as shadowy and ominous, thinking about the process behind creating
them is potentially much more joyful. On the page we might see thin slashes and
crisscrosses of light against darkened trees, and a corner of pale sky peeking
out, but if we consider the movements—by the body, the arm, the fire, the
photographer—and materials necessary to capture that particular light pattern
on film, then we can also begin imagining the experience. I appreciate that Light
Experiments captures moments of process, and I am happy that in thinking
about process I feel invited to imagine the bodily forms partially depicted in
these images also as wholes, dancing and gesturing and leaving traces in the
world at night.
Barnes’s artist statement points out
“this photographic chapbook has no linear narrative, and constructs an
experience that will be different for every viewer;” here, I’ve offered my
experience of reading and exploring Light Experiments. I hope that you
will pick up a copy too, so that you may compare it with your own.
