The Brooklyn Rail

“When people look at my pictures,” the Swiss-American photographer Robert Frank once said, “I want them to feel the way they do when they want to read a line of a poem twice.”

In Ensnaring the Moment art critic Leah Ollman makes a case for doing just that​. In gathering poems that compel readers to take a second look at photography, both as aesthetic medium and material​, she reveals affinities between the disciplines that far exceed their shared ability to sustain ongoing, contemplative engagement. Since Horace, the first-century Roman poet, wrote “as is painting, so is poetry”—also translated as “a painting is a poem without words”—painting and poetry have been cast as sister arts. But far less attention has been paid to the enduring kinship between poetry and photography, a surprising oversight given how often images are described as “poetic” and poems as “photographic.” It’s from this observation that Ollman’s project emerged.

The anthology comprises more than one hundred poems, spanning from the nineteenth century to the present, alongside vernacular photographs from private collections, often cropped to appear atmospheric and abstract. Together, they illuminate the expressive impulses, formal techniques, and methods of meaning-making central to both disciplines. Like Frank, Ollman resists linear narrative. She neither pairs the poems with pictures nor arranges them into rigid thematic or formal categories. Instead, they seem to progress like tides—rising, tipping, and receding, revisiting the same questions about the nature of sight, time, and truth.

In her elegant introductory essay, Ollman identifies various threads for the reader to follow throughout the anthology—the contraction of time, the distillation of experience, the preservation of a moment—then allows them to form their own interpretations and draw their own connections. In an early poem, “Photo of Us on the Cottage Front Porch,” Fleda Brown asks, “We were there then, weren’t we[?]” meaning their future fates—her sister's brain tumor—were already alive in them as the young women they were in the photograph. In a later poem, “The Photos,” Diane Wakoski answers, yes, seeing in her mother’s “stony face with bulldog jaws” her own aged face: “How I hate my destiny.” Then again, Jenny Xie in “Lunar New Year, 1988,” observes the flatness of time in a photo where, “At my back: / the years ahead, strangely lit.” The collection benefits from rereading, wherein the poems and images continually reframe one another.

The poems, by writers like Frank Bidart, Lucille Clifton, Langston Hughes, George Oppen, Adrienne Rich, and Wisława Szymborska, speak for and against the photographic image, the documentary act, and the artistic craft. Drawing on thinkers such as Roland Barthes, Susan Sontag, and Eadweard Muybridge, they examine the role of the witness and the tyranny of the image in contemporary culture. As Ollman notes, the poems are not only “instances of incandescent language” but “unfettered acts of criticism and lyric forays into photo theory.” The writers interrogate their own medium’s infidelities and failures through their examination of the approximate form, something Robert Lowell wrestles with in “Epilogue”: “sometimes everything I write / … seems a snapshot, / lurid, rapid, garish, grouped, / heightened from life, / yet paralyzed by fact.” They often reveal the conflation of sign and signified that occurs at the hands of both artists. A poem, like an image, is not the subject it evokes but is concerned with its nearness, with the intimacy of looking, and with the associations that looking closely and continuously creates.

Many of the poems borrow metaphors from photography’s lexicon—acid, aperture, retouch, fade—as in Mary Jo Bang’s “Portrait as Self-Portrait,” where “the emulsion acts like a layer/ that lies between what I once saw and what I now think.” Other poems speak to specific well-known photographs like Szymborska’s “Photograph from September 11,” where she attempts a kind of intervention—a form of magical thinking—suspending the figure in air, like a photographer: “I can do only two things for them— / describe this flight / and not add a last line.” Or Kate Daniel’s “War Photograph,” on her encounter with the 1972 image of a nine-year-old girl running naked from a napalm attack on her village in Vietnam: “She keeps on running, you know, / after the shutter of the camera / clicks. She’s running to us.”

References to personal family photographs drift through the poems, often evoking poignant reflections on the distance between then and now, appearances and reality. “A good photograph,” Frank Bidart observes upon seeing the photos his father put on display in “Candidate,” “tells you everything / that’s really going on is invisible.” In “Formal Family Portraits,” Deborah Pope meditates on the disconnect between the framed image and the moment that came just before her family put on their new clothes and sat for the photographer and the moment after, writing, “this is how we tried to look this is how / we want to be remembered.” The cropped sepia-toned image of a woman and a young girl, presumably a mother and daughter, both in dresses, follows the poem. Most of the photographs interspersed between the texts are less illustrative, instead contributing a sense of mood, a nebulous feeling of loss, the grain of nostalgia. The familiar poses and anonymous faces enact an imperative integral to both arts: to reach the universal through the personal, the general through the granular.

Time, in all its manifold manifestations, mediates the ways of seeing and feeling in the images and texts alike. Just as the photographer freezes, distorts, and demarcates time with her physical camera, so too does the poet with her metaphorical one. As Jack Gilbert writes in “Beyond Pleasure,” the lens and line isolate a moment in the “endless flowing forward,” so we might see it as “separate and enough.” He, along with many of the other writers, reminds us that both the poem and the photo are products less of accretion and creation than of excision and distillation. In “Daguerreotypes,” Rick Barot ties exclusion not only to formal but to political concerns: illuminating how photography has been historically used as a tool for erasure and lamenting the “people, apparently, not worth keeping / in the expense of solvents.” The closely cropped photographic images of hands—pointing, waving, holding—emphasize what is kept out of the frame. In “Ode to the Clothesline,” Kwame Dawes tells us what is not seen in Alfred Stieglitz’s picture of laundry drying in the sun, namely, the “labor of brown hands, / elbow-deep in suds, the rituals / of cleansing.”

Ultimately, what Ollman shows is that the kinship between poetry and photography lies in their contradictions: presence and absence, the ephemeral and eternal, the private and political. By allowing the poems and images to come up against one another without mediation or resolution, Ensnaring the Moment enables new, or what Barthes might call “third,” meanings to arise in the space between.