’Inside now. The word is white.
It covers my tongue like paint—-
I say it and light forms,
Bottles arise, emptiness opens its corridors
Into the entrances and endless things that form bears.
White, great eviscerator.’
From ‘Still life with stick and word’ by Charles Wright (I’ve used a quote from him before, with one of the first images I posted). His poems are full of light and dark, with great empty vistas. The line length varies greatly, with lots of indentation so that the words are literally surrounded by white on the page.
In a photograph or photogram white is a marker of nothing, in the sense that nothing happened here. No light hit the photographic paper, or if it did then no developer touched the surface to turn it dark. That part of the paper remained as it started, unchanged.
When I first scanned this image, at a higher resolution, the scanner didn’t know what to make of all the white space so it divided it into four separate scans, as if only the black lines counted.
The black lines were created ‘Accidentally on purpose’, to use the title of a poem by Robert Frost. I dipped the edges of newspaper in developer and placed it on the photographic paper, then dragged the edges slightly, letting the developer penetrate the print and smear or pool wherever it would.
It took me a while to decide that the image had enough in it; it has emptiness and distance, if nothing else. Snow-like, desert-like perhaps, which gives me leave to quote another Frost poem:
’They cannot scare me with their empty spaces
Between stars – on stars where no human race is.
I have it in me so much nearer home
To scare myself with my own desert places.’
(from ‘Desert Places’)
Dave Eva Photograms 
great image, and post. I know figurative associations aren’t the (your) point, but I was immediately reminded of photos/paintings of Paschendaele in the snow (No Mans Land, another kind of negative space…). But also the connection between negative space and Keats’ negative capability – our capacity to tolerate or embrace doubt, confusion, mental spaces where no-thing (in the sense of an event with a clear fixed meaning to it) has happened, or not yet. Which might be Frost’s desert places, I suppose.
LikeLike
Thanks Phil. You’ve seen things in it that hadn’t occurred to me, but now you’ve suggested the western front that’s what I see. And you’re quite right about the Keats/Frost link; Frost described his own poems as ‘a momentary stay against confusion’. I’m also beginning to think through how, in a photogram the white space is where the objects were.’All that is solid melts into air’ in a sense that Marx never intended..
LikeLike