THE WRITING EYE : EXPLORING PHOTOPOETRY
& FILMPOETRY

Will be run next as a group course in 2023. Now available as an individual program, with details here www.stevenjfowler.com/courses
Taught by Steven J Fowler. For booking, via paypal, please click here

The potential of image and text is an endless field of creative exploration. Yet, despite the ubiquitous access we have to cameras, it remains underexplored and underappreciated as its own medium. This course traces the history of photopoetry and filmpoetry and draws it into the 21st century, rooted in making over theory, method over all else - it aims to provoke questions while exploring examples from a variety of fields - from conceptual art to surrealism, collage to concrete poetry, from modernism to collaborative practice.

We ask what makes up the essence of photography, film and poetry, and how might they interact to move beyond traditions in both fields, as something new, a true photopoetry or filmpoetry? We ask what is hybridity, truly, and simultaneity, and photoliteracy, and illustration? What is a poem in time, on film? How has the technology needed for the cinema and video evolved what a poem might be? What is the line between documentation and artwork?

Poet-photographer-filmmakers featured on the course will range from the historical to the contemporary, from canonical modern figures to "outsider" artists, from Laszlo Moholy-Nagy to Barbara Kruger, Francesca Woodman to August Strindberg, Peter Greenaway to Hamish Fulton, Blaise Cendrars to Martha Rosler, Susan Hiller to Yamamoto Kansuke, Paul Muldoon / Norman McBeath to Paul Eluard / Man Ray.

Images - Barbara Kruger, Hamish Fulton, Paul Eluard / Man Ray, Keith Arnatt, Robert Montgomery.

Participants will be sent a succinct document of resources once a week for seven weeks – ideas, examples, concepts, history, accompanied by exercises or prompts. Then, via correspondence, they can share their work in response with direct feedback and suggestions. When the course finishes, an event or publication will consolidate that which participants have produced.

Email steven at yahoo.co.uk with any questions.

An essay on poetry and photography for the Photographers Gallery https://thephotographersgallery.org.uk/viewpoints/poetry-and-photography-essay

"An exploration of the intersections between poetry and photography is an act of defining terms. It is a process of identification. Of a question. But it does not entail an answer, necessarily. How does one align such disparity between mediums that can only be connected through recourse to metaphors? How does one move past the traditional alignment of image and word that tends to emphasise precisely this dislocation? To begin, we must ask ourselves what these mediums actually are, at heart, and then what they can be together? Finally, what is the purpose of their combination? What can they do together? And why is it relatively rare to see a cohesive combination of the two - with fidelity to poetry that isn’t just text, or discourse, or opinion, and photography that isn’t just pictorial?.........." 

This article follows the courses, taught by SJ Fowler, The Written Eye at The Photographers Gallery and The Light Room at the Poetry School, and a seminar for Writing Photographs at Tate Modern, as well as the curation of the Phoetry exhibition at the Museum of Futures.

For more on course leader, SJ Fowler