Between the Photograph and the Poem: A Dialogue on Poetic Practice with Roy Miki (original) (raw)
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Interview Between the Photograph and the Poem: A Dialogue on Poetic Practice with
"B etween the Photograph and the Poem" explores the capacity of creative work to generate possibilities that elude the instrumental terms of dominant visual and discursive regimes, whether regimes of racialization, trans/nationalism or commodification. The interview focuses on the creative work of Roy Miki, who has received a Governor General Award for his poetry and has been named a member of the Order of Canada for his work in cultural politics. The interview explores Miki's changing relation to photographic imagery, especially with respect to his poetic work over the last several decades. With his experience as an activist in the Japanese Canadian movement for redress, along with the role he played in opening up literary studies and more generally the study of cultural formations in Canada to questions regarding the politics of race, Miki discusses how he has navigated spaces of erasure in language and visual regimes amidst expanding transnational commodification. McAllister and Miki constructed the resulting dialogue over a four-month period. 2 Photography and a language of displacement KM: Your recent visual collages re-envision places in Vancouver within the contemporary global landscape through the life of commodities, or to be more precise, through the ethereal world of mannequins that brings commodities to life. 3 This could be viewed as a departure from your poetic work with the written word and your concerns about "race" and the discursive constitution of Japanese Canadian and Asian Canadian subjects. But from our discussions about moving into the recesses of representation-into the internal workings of language and its discursive power-and making sites for creation that exceed the limits of language, whether by subverting rhythms, hanging on the resonance of a vowel or the metonymic slippage between meanings, it is clear that you have had a complex and changing relation to photographic representations over the years, starting with photographic representations of the Japanese Canadian (JC) body.
Imaged Communities: Putting Canadian Photographic History in its Place
“Imaged Communities” imagines Canada as a network of photographic knowledge. Co-written by six members of Canadian Photography History/Histoire de la photographie canadienne (CPH/HPC), a research team based at Concordia University in Montreal, this essay examines the meeting places created by photographic technology. The mapping of these histories addresses the central questions about photographic history and mediated experience that have motivated this research—What did Canadians know about photography, and when did they know it?–and supplements it with a third—Where did these encounters take place? The introduction establishes the sites and parameters of the contribution. First, the research draws on the digital anthology of Canadian photographic literature that the authors are putting forward as a history of the medium in Canada—a community imaged at every stage of its mutation from colony to nation and thereby imagined, in Benedict Anderson’s well-known formulation (1991). This is a fragmentary photographic history, which accounts for the polyphonic nature of this text. Second, the authors write as art historians and photographic specialists, mindful of the various turns in the humanities and sciences that have engaged with, and sometimes emerged from, discoveries in photographic studies, the spatial turn most pertinent to this inquiry. The authors point out, however, that photographic practice has more than kept pace with theory. There is much to learn from artists’, documentarians’, snapshooters’, and compilers’ projects: their uses of photography as instruments of investigation; their photographic formulations of philosophical ideas and social conditions; the heuristic circle formed by the circulation of their work; and the penetration of that circle by neglected interests. For that reason, this group includes a creation-researcher, whose art historical practice is informed by the making of a photographic work. His armchair-tourist colleagues write at the intersection of photographic knowledge and photographic experience; the introduction seeks to elucidate the structure of that space. A third element of the introduction is an explanation of the lack of an authoritative history of Canadian photography, and how CPH/HPC and its network of individual and institutional collaborators are working within that gap to create new historiographical models. Five short studies follow, each using the intersection of photography and place as an organizing principle. In the first, a brief survey of photographic literature on or about the Canadian West focusses on two bodies of work: a professional tourist’s travelogue of the West (and further West) as he constructed it in 1909 from his railcar, his hotel, and his campground; and a photographer/filmmaker’s lifelong investment in the representation of his diverse community, the North End of Winnipeg, Manitoba. The second study closes in on a single city—Toronto—as celebrated and chronicled in two nineteenth-century publications, and as revisited in a late twentieth-century exhibition and catalogue project based on the photographic collection of Library and Archives Canada. These curatorial perspectives on the city illuminate the social values of their day. In the third study, post-Centennial selection and uses of photographs from the Isaac Erb studio (c1870-1924) in Saint John, New Brunswick, are closely compared with the uses of those photographs at the time of their making and with a more complete version of the Erb oeuvre preserved in the provincial archives, revealing a photographic record of material culture that reflects the port city’s emergence as a transnational, consumer economy. The fourth study moves to another Canadian port via the photographic holdings of the Canadian Museum of Immigration at Pier 21 in Halifax, Nova Scotia, an ocean liner terminal and immigration shed-turned-museum. Through online display of its primarily digital collection, this doorway to Canada, selectively open between 1928 and 1971, is photographically preserved as a relational space, forever in between. Finally, a contemporary artist’s photographic study of photography and walking, conducted on boulevard Saint-Laurent in Montreal, creates a processual space of creation, bringing this essay full circle to the image and its imaginer. The conclusion underscores the dialogical structure of our relationships with photography, wherever we find it.
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