Dusk —
The blizzard hides everything,
Even the nightJack Kerouac
Gallery
images © 2023-2025 Rico Michel
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 travel 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
Form precedes meaning
There is no objective truth in photography. The image is never more than a fragment of reality, a truncated, momentary, and incomplete point of view. The image is subjective, and its truth is always multiple, like that of the observer, or unfathomable, like that of the artist.
If there is such a thing as a “photographic truth”, it is to be found in its fundamental elements: light, composition, and optical device.
I have therefore attempted, inspired by the simplified form of the haiku and the mechanical honesty of Man Ray’s rayographs, to imagine an aesthetic that would stem solely from the photographic form itself.
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.
