The title is a quote from John Burnside in his 2002 poem ‘The Light Trap’, from his collection of the same name. He wasn’t writing about photograms; his poem is about catching and counting moths, starting when he was a boy, rigging up ‘a sail of light amidst the apple trees’. But his lines feel akin to photography, and I like to have them standing next to my image:
‘And this is how darkness works: an alchemy
of chalk and silver, all our memories
of other gardens, distance, moonlit streams,
transformed to something punctual and slight,
flickering in the trap and only
guessed-at from the forms we sometimes glimpse
across a border, shapes we fail to name..
……………………………
Now I have been an amateur of light
for years, a surreptitious
builder in the dark of quiet snares,
to draw in from the air what it conceals,
nothing defined, but distance visible
as dancing flakes of life dusted with warmth
and pattern……….. ‘
Dave Eva Photograms 