The Photographic Print poem by Dyfed Lloyd Evans
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The Photographic Print
An image forged in hell —
This print, a silver-halide mockery,
One of a set, made to sell
A point of view
Disturbing grains ingrained
In oscillations of a fixing tank
Making light of permanence —
Eternalizing transience
An instant stretched forever
Preserved in tinted monochrome
To hang, forgotten, on your wall…
The war-torn marching on
Rags woven into riches,
Their impact lost by deep familiarity
That ceases now to shock
Or even move the heart
Distant atrocities — those
Lost absurdities
That no-one dares recall
Yet which were caught
By some past artist's eye
And made this hanging on your wall
This rare, but scarce-remembered print
This print, a silver-halide mockery,
One of a set, made to sell
A point of view
Disturbing grains ingrained
In oscillations of a fixing tank
Making light of permanence —
Eternalizing transience
An instant stretched forever
Preserved in tinted monochrome
To hang, forgotten, on your wall…
The war-torn marching on
Rags woven into riches,
Their impact lost by deep familiarity
That ceases now to shock
Or even move the heart
Distant atrocities — those
Lost absurdities
That no-one dares recall
Yet which were caught
By some past artist's eye
And made this hanging on your wall
This rare, but scarce-remembered print
Over a decade old now, this poem dates to 1993 and an art display at the South Bank Center in London which was a comparison of war phogographs from the 1930s to the current day. I can't remember the precise image (nor the photographer) who inspired this poem precisely, but it struck me just how the suffering of those people in the images was being used to sell the image itself, to sell the papers who had originally shown it and was even now being used to sell the display I was seeing. Somehow it seemed basically obscene and yet fascinating; and it is this dichotomy that drives all art.
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