“How do we respond to photographs that have shaped our age? Stephanie Blair Mitchell answers with poems to match their power. Mitchell’s Viewfinder is a stunning achievement, a treasure for all from a beautiful writer, photographer, and soul.”
–From Sarah Elizabeth Lewis, John L. Loeb Associate Professor of the Humanities and Associate Professor of African and African American Studies at Harvard University. Lewis is an art and cultural historian and founder of Vision & Justice.
https://sarahelizabethlewis.com/
Photographer Stephanie Blair Mitchell has embarked on the daring project of juxtaposing photographs and text in a beautiful new book. Yes, of course, this has been done scores of times but her approach proves a unique synthesis, and a bold one. Bold because it takes a shrewd and sensitive approach to photography, photographers, and history, as well as, on occasion, her own story. In verse.
Mitchell covers ground from the first heliograph in 1826 to the experimental, digital work of Andreas Gefeller. She is not presenting a comprehensive history of the art, but her own choices out of this vast history, displaying the works and workers she finds most compelling and historically important.
No traditional explanatory texts accompanies these photographs. Instead, each image is enhanced by a poem. The poet is Mitchell herself, whose canny insights and wonderful way with rhythm produce a sort of personal autobiographical look at the photos she’s chosen.
There are a few familiar images in “Viewfinder.” Michell opens our eyes in a new way to these photographs. We see Dorothea Lange’s portrait of the migrant mother and her children —- but Mitchell’s accompanying poem tells us much more about the making of this now-legendary photograph than the layperson could imagine. She also takes an almost defiant stance toward the unforgettable, ghastly photo by Eddie Adams, Saigon Execution:
There is magic in the moment –
moments inspire movements –
History is not changed
by being content.
All of the photos – beautifully reproduced – feature Mitchell’s intellectual, sometimes emotional, often witty poetic responses. A skillful writer, Mitchell shows equal dexterity in free and formal verse. She tells wonderful stories in this medium, including the adventures of Jessie Tarbox Beals:
Atop trees, trains, telephone poles she delights
flying from hot air balloons to automobiles
There are also moving photos and pictures about her own family and her late celebrated father, the artist and photographer John Blair Mitchell.
Whether she’s discussing the chemical magic of making pictures or the personal lives of great artists, Mitchell always compels the reader to turn the page.
–Alec Solomita is an artist and writer working in Massachusetts. His poetry has appeared in many journals, including Poetica, Lothlorien Poetry Journal, The Galway Review, The Lake, One Art, and several anthologies. His chapbook “Do Not Forsake Me,” was published in 2017 by Finishing Line Press. His full-length poetry book, “Hard To Be a Hero,” was released by Kelsay Books in the spring of 2021. He’s just finished another, tentatively titled “Small Change.”
Stephanie Blair Mitchell’s debut chapbook, Viewfinder, intrigues the relationship between poetry and photography, with uncompromising artistic vision. The poems in this collection, rendered like a “Sun writing / lavender oil and petroleum / on a pewter plate,” or a “conspiracy between copper sheets” invoke longings, each turn of phrase evincing a world without its veils. The photos, some by well-known photographers Mann and Lange, some by Mitchell herself, like white space between stanzas, interrupt and construct modes of being we providentially reside in as well. Mitchell’s photographic eye clearly influences her poetic eye, as the works here, imbued with rich imagery, raise the reader’s awareness of a world coming into focus, which despite its flaws is still beautiful and still worthy of our attention.
–Ralph Pennel, https://ralphpennel.com/
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