Dusk —
The blizzard hides everything,
Even the nightJack Kerouac
Gallery
images © 2023-2025 Rico Michel
A few words
With their few black lines against a white background, these photographs were already aesthetically very close to Japanese ink wash painting, known as sumi-e. From there, it was but a short step to drawing a parallel with another form of short expression focused on the present moment, the haiku.
Although I am primarily interested in the language inherent in images, I noticed that prose was subtly creeping into the pages of this project. I considered protesting, but it would have been against a fait accompli; these two were already walking hand in hand.
Form, once again, had taken precedence over detail, and intuition easily prevailed over reason. I now had to find the right words. All that remained was to invoke the spirit of Bashō.
The world in miniature
The haiku is a short three-line poem describing an observation made in the present moment. The instantaneous form of the haiku evokes a Polaroid that the traveling poet might have composed and slipped into his notebook.
Emerging in XVIIᵗʰ century Japan, the haiku bears witness to the existence of a “photographic gaze” that predates the invention of photography by a few centuries.
The poet and the photographer, one working with ink, the other with light, are driven by the same intention: to capture a moment of the world and to create a miniature version of it. It is a uniquely human desire to make one’s memory tangible.
“And just at the moment when I was thinking about your new idea for a poem, I saw a haiku through the window.”
— Jack Kerouac writing to Lois Sorrells
Taken on medium format film, each photograph in this series is available as a limited edition, 24×24 inches (61×61 cm) analog print mounted on a frameless sheet of aluminium.
