Visual Lyricism

Exploring the connection between poetry and photography.

The photographer Alex Soth says, “poetry functions closer to photography than any other medium.”

But what makes a photograph poetic? And how can an understanding of poetry help shape how we both see and create a photograph?

In this discussion, we’ll look at images and poems. We’ll touch on prosody, or the formal aspects of poetry, such as metaphor, line breaks, and rhythm. We’ll ask questions about our images–Is there a visual economy? An elegance? Do the elements enjoy mysterious intimacy with the other elements they live with inside the frame?

We’ll discuss photographers using literal poetry alongside their work and talk about what transpires in the space created between the image and the words.

While self-taught in photography, Karen Zusman has an MFA in Poetry from Columbia University. Her favourite poets are those whose verse is dense with visual metaphor. As a photographer, her work is a mix of documentary, street, and portraiture. She is recognized for her intimacy, warmth and lyrical sensibility that comes from seeing the world through a poet’s eyes. Always looking for ways to engage her background in poetry with her love of photography, she created the Super Power of Me Project, which combines portraits of NYC youth and their poetry in a large-scale outdoor exhibit. This project received the Leica Women’s Foto Project Award and was featured in New York Times and ABC News.