SubStance

When poetry and photography begin a discussion, even a polite one, what role does the reader/viewer play? Does he or she take the event into account, is the discussion read or watched, or is it the interactivity between the two media that draws attention? Taking the event into account might be the only honest choice when, paradoxically, the reader’s eyes are at first listening to the words that the mind is configuring based on the visual form of the letters appearing on the page and then attempting to link those images to the photos. The least that can be asked of readers is to keep an open mind when opening La Lecture by Jan Baetens and Milan Chlumsky.

Baetens and Chlumsky address two paintings by Henri Fantin-Latour (1870 Henri Fantin-Latour (1877) entitled La Lecture, the obvious inspiration for their book, which is divided into three parts: a series entitled Feu (“Fire”) of thirteen of Chlumsky’s photos separated by blank pages, followed by forty fourteen-line poems written by Baetens that recall the length of the traditional sonnet. The conversation between the two media ends with a series of ten photos, also separated by blank pages and titled Mouvement. In their introduction, “Lire, cet acte” (“Reading, that act”; all translations mine), Baetens and Chlumsky lay out their objectives. They make believe that they are entering into the chamber that Fantin-Latour painted and where two women are seated, one reading aloud to the other. All three of them, Fantin-Latour, Baetens and Chlumsky, are attempting to exploit and enrich “cette idée de silence” (“this idea of silence” [5]), a silence that plays a particular role, one that offers two women “l’évasion par la lecture” (“a reading-evasion”) and allows them to occupy “un monde à elles” (“a world of their own” [6]). The evasion, as well as the distance taken from the reality of their chamber, attract Baetens and Chlumsky, who decided to show what the painter says (6) without “tomber dans les facilités de l’anachronisme ou de l’actualisation” (“falling into the comfort of anachronism and staying current” [6–7]). In effect, the two Fantin-Latour paintings communicate the embodiment of distance that a shared, private, and intimate reading create. Since the paintings form a sort of “tableau double”—the first one painted in 1870 and then retaken in 1877—Baetens and Chlumsky’s book also takes on the form of a two-winged diptych, one written, the other [End Page 103] photographic. The heart of their project expresses, they hope, the “liberté inconditionnelle” (“unconditional freedom”) that is derived from “une certaine idée de la lecture” (“a particular idea of reading” [8]), a freedom that puts into play prose, words, literarity, spoken-word reading, all of them contributing, with the photographs, to a new omni-visual experience of reading. In this book, a painter from over 150 years ago partners with a poet and a photographer particularly sensitive to contemporary culture.

Baetens and Chlumsky are set comfortably in the twenty-first century, so they are well aware of the challenges facing poetry and reading, yet they find their inspiration in the nineteenth century. Nineteenth-century poetry and painting offer up versions of modernity, the activities of daily life; they are lyrical and even express the social results of the industrial revolution, whereas the twenty-first century advances a visual cultural involving cinematic features, inter-modality and the digital era. The first series of photographs, Feu (Fire), combines the two periods. Its photos of an old warehouse fire reveal patterns and emptiness. Because of the fire, outside light filters through missing ceilings, highlighting its bricks, wooden doors and windows, twisted steel beams and cement floors. Chlumsky’s photos focus on this abandoned warehouse, which appears to serve as a home for the homeless but no longer fulfills its original function. The photographer highlights the patterns created by the burning flames on the walls and facades that, like cryptic letters, communicate a destructive, transformative, and embellishing force. How then to...