words in search of a photograph

Years ago, I encountered Luigi Pirandello’s Six Characters in Search of an Author, a play that not only resonated deeply with me but also stirred a range of conceptual ideas I was eager to explore through photography. One of the play’s central themes — the fraught relationship between illusion and reality — has long fascinated artists and critics alike, and its continued relevance offered fertile ground for visual interpretation. But it was a particular moment early in the play that truly struck me: six fictional characters enter the stage and declare themselves “incomplete but independent products of an artist’s imagination.” That paradox — of autonomy without closure — stayed with me.

This idea of incomplete yet compelling voices searching for form became a point of departure for the photographic series. Over time, I began collecting lines from poets who have left a lasting impact on me, especially T.S. Eliot. These fragments of verse — deeply personal, rich in ambiguity, and often unresolved — became the foundation for the work. Each photograph in the series is paired with a stamped line of poetry on the mat board, creating a dialogue between text and image. The words do not merely caption the photographs; they provoke them. My task was to find or create images that could respond to the emotional and philosophical resonance of the text, not by illustrating the words, but by standing beside them as equal, interpretive gestures.

The process behind each photograph was long and deliberate. These are not quick captures or spontaneous impressions; each black and white silver gelatin print emerged through a slow, tactile, and often difficult development process. While there are a few digital color pieces in the collection, my true commitment lies with black and white film. There’s a certain gravitas, a timelessness, in black and white photography that continues to draw me in — an ability to transcend the moment and speak to something more enduring.

To deepen that sense of timelessness, I chose to stamp each mat board with a vintage font taken from an Underwood typewriter manufactured in the 1930s. The physicality of the stamped words — slightly uneven, imperfect, ink pressed into paper — becomes an extension of the work itself. It adds weight and presence to the text, grounding the ephemeral in the material.

This is a new and still-unseen body of work, consisting of 42 photographs in total, with 12 completed and presented here. The prints vary in size and are mounted on white, acid-free 8-ply board, then framed in minimalist flat black metal — a quiet presentation meant to allow the interplay of image and language to remain the focus.