From the course: Narrative Portraiture: On Location in Texas with Keith Carter

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A poetic approach to viewing photographs

A poetic approach to viewing photographs

From the course: Narrative Portraiture: On Location in Texas with Keith Carter

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A poetic approach to viewing photographs

Keith Carter: Going back to our earlier conversation, well, what makes you look at a picture more than once, that kind of thing, in the early days of poetry, things were always orated because nobody could read. So it would be the priest or the tribal elder or what have you who would orate, and poems were read three times. The first, it was just like that. It went one place, here, and the second time you heard it, like a song, it goes here, and the third time you heard it, it kind of infuses your whole body. I think that's the same with some photographs. I mean sometimes you look at it and it's wonderful. You look at it second time, oh my god, that's really wonderful, or the third time, that's devastating. Or it just don't work at all, like bad poems. Chris Orwig: I enjoyed hearing Keith talk a little bit about how he finds these comparisons between poetry, writing, and photography, and there is one thing in particular that struck a chord with me. He was talking about poetry. He…

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