NEW! Laura Larson & Brian Teare

Haze, 2003



There is neither God nor nature in photography. Like faith
a discrete series of disappearances; like God the abrading of
arrested motion—landscape is active absence, part of the
design. That’s why photography’s trees can never be the trees
of painting or of nature : we expect them to correspond to
themselves and then they slip, asymbolic, outside of religion,
outside of ritual until the upper limit of our nostalgia seems a
high green canopy and its lower a mat of rust-colored needles
so thick and acidic it permits no undergrowth, a perspective
intended for reverie. Nature is essential to photography’s
invention, but it’s the picturesque—a way of picturing nature—
that aids photography’s development. It becomes more difficult
to position the frame : does photography simply wipe out one
space in order to invent another? Good-bye, perhaps. The first
art in which God never existed, its trees arranged by men.

Discursive Glance





A Picture That Includes by Means of Its Structure the Excluded Space



I’ve held this
smallest forest


sticky with sap
haptic branches swaying


in nonce wind—
a syntax


outside the frame
of the visible—


and longed to be struck
as I should
to say I’ve loved


It’s no small thing


Let each eye
be believed


the way cicadas leave
clinging skins


split to drone
umbra’s grass


Let matter rest
in belief


it has lent itself
to all our purposes


liminal and image
the way veronica is


a flower
a girl watching
a matador


wave his cape
over charging eyes—


each only once
given one


of matter’s many
possible nouns


Let each pass by


picture
difference
or surprise


In that still space
we won’t stop


finding and losing
what we love


all day
we’ll keep on



thinking
because it once existed


it still exists


very arbor very body
very smoke