Week 4.1: cyanotypes

Brief remarks from this week,  since we were mostly busy with our cyanotypes. I do think it’s worth bearing in mind something that Accra said before he shepherded us into our improvised darkroom. To wit, a word on the page means what it means wherever it falls in that white field. Our attention gets to it when it gets to it, reading left to right and top to bottom. Whereas, an element of an image changes profoundly in meaning depending on where it is positioned within the frame. What are the strategies, he asked, by which a visual artist draws attention to a particular area of the image? What is their relation to the strategies of emphasis by which certain words, phrases, lines etc. might be made to stand out from others in a poem? And for that matter, are there effects of meaning in a poem that can be attributed to the arrangement of the words in space (as opposed to the notional time that it takes to read the text—does space, in a poem, translate into time with no remainder; forsake the eye in favor of the ear?).