THE ODD MAGAZINE

MÁRTON KOPPÁNY: Dear Roy, you are considered to be a brilliant photographer and one of the most original mail artists in the field, but perhaps you haven’t gotten the right attention as a first rate concrete and visual poet, which is funny, because it tells a lot about the gravitational force of categorization. (I think it is so even if Dan Waber and Geof Huth have published you on their blogs, and Geof wrote about your art a couple of beautiful texts.) Anyway, I read your “photo/cards” as visual poems, or simply: as poetry. It is not too important what they are, of course. (What is not poetry today – or in general? But is a poem a poem?) The core of the thing is, that although many of your “photo/cards” were conceived and sent in the mail for special occasions, with a specific recipient in mind, their privacy is mysteriously inclusive, they are in one-to-one, intimate communication with “us”. One of my many favorites is titled “Sudden Horse / Joyful Gift”, and this is the brief comment I wrote about it when I first saw it  many years ago:

 

A gift for us? For the horse? It is a puzzle but certainly not an alarming one. It is rather the fulfillment of a promise that I can't understand exactly.

 

Could you please tell me more about this specific work? When did you make it? Was it addressed to anyone or is it “street-photography”? In any case, you have used it as a postcard and sent it out as such. Maybe several times, on several occasions. As a response? A reaction to another work got in the mail? The title, printed on the card, certainly adds to the lyricism and dry humor characteristic of your art, and the distance between the title and the image contributes to the effect that we should somehow be able to read what we see.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

ROY ARENELLA: Marton, at this late hour, the only possible way to get my contribution to you is to put aside as useless what I have written so far. There is no quick-fix for it. I’ve not deleted it; might be useful later.

 

Since I promised not to abandon my part in this project, the only option, if I want to continue, (I do)  is to accept what is offered by some kind of Compromise (a very quick kind!). This means for me, that I must put aside the details in (& of) your First Question & see only its broad outline. Or maybe take the exactly opposite approach: zoom right up-close, focus myopically, intuitively on what catches me as a possible new starting point. I have a print out of the  email with your questions. I’ve read it many times (too many). And just now again.

      

Your introductory remarks are flattering. They stop me in my tracks. I don’t want them to end. Maybe I wont read any further!! I’ll remained stopped.

     

You mention the photo/card “Sudden Horse/Joyful Gift”.  I expected you would. Because you have done so before. I saw it in writing (on a blog?) & liked what you wrote. The questioning is circular : I love the expression, “What comes around, goes around”. It seems to apply here.

     

I mail cards not only to poets, or (to what people like to call) “artists types”. I send them also to normal people! I always wonder what they think. They must be surprised. People don't get real mail anymore. No envelopes with a handwritten address, return address, & a stamp that the sender actually chooses. 

 

I remember going to Paris with Martine in the 1970s & very often seeing tourists sitting outdoors at café tables with 2 stacks of postcards, elbow-close; one of the completed cards, the other, cards awaiting completion. If  I tell you (or anybody else) that this year we were in France & Italy for two (2) solid, continuous months (including one week in Paris, one week in Rome) & saw only 2 people, a father & son, who had postcards stacked on their table – if  I make this observation & mention it (maybe adding a second comment about the ubiquitous appearance of cell phones all over Europe) would you assume I was making a large& ludic comment on “our times”?

 

It’s not that; it’s not an “issue”, a cause, a complaint against. It is personal,  private (interior), concerning my own preferences, needs, biases – my own personality. And here I’ll try again to discuss the photo/card in your questions.   

 

The photo/cards are homemade from pictures I take, develop & print on photographic paper in my cellar darkroom. The pictures, the photographic images in the main are the same as the photographs I have taken since the early 1960s. –the photo/cards are something I began, then developed & extended because I found it useful, it accommodated the needs of my personality, fit my sense of how time should move.

 

Because, now as I was working with words, drawings, postage stamps, rubber stamps collage, etc  –I found these new involvements more interesting, more satisfying, gratifying. I could work at any time, anyplace, not only at prearranged darkroom sessions. 

 

This last fact, being able to work all the time was practically, logistically a great impetus to continue. In my walks, or while driving, watching a film on tv I could find & use actual material (not only photographs of things). My proclivity to collect was more satisfied. It would require too much time to discuss all the ways that I benefited, that my personality was accommodated by this shift.

 

By shifting from photographs to photocards I could work at a deeper level of attention. More energy seemed available. And more ambition.

 

I would like to mention  –only mention, no fortune cookie psychology –  what photo/cards became for me internally. As I created or rather encountered their use, photo/cards developed into one way I was able to develop my sense of SOCIABILITY. I prefer one-to-one conversation, don’t like parties, am still not comfortable at a dinner party with close friends. I hate the telephone and am glad that my wife uses social media, but relieved that I don’t. The photo/card is my social media. It fits what I can do, and feel good doing. It’s letter time as opposed to email time; letter distance more than drop-in-anytime intimacy; appreciation of a mail system that is generous with things to look at and touch and collect. One of the joys when I get postcards is the materiality of the card as a thing in itself. This is not a strange reaction, stamp collecting is still a very popular hobby, and postal ephemera is collected by many people.

 

During the same time period that I cut up existing photos to use as postcards to friends, I was also putting a one page poetry broadside named Newsfax. It began in 1971 and ended in 1975. 33 issues were mailed out to friends, friends of friends, interested family, plus anyone who inquired about it. A few poets were on my list, as well as actor friends active in off-off theater productions. The list reached 26 people, cumulatively.

 

As I remember, they were standard concrete poems (typewriter poems) and other design word poems and visual poems. The latter included collage, and much of my interest in this new-to-me poetry was gleaned from 2 anthologies (Mary Ellen Solt’s and Emmett Williams’).

And Ian Hamilton Finlay whose books I bought directly from his Wild Hawthorn Press in Scottland. I also very much appreciated Robert Lax whose work was harder to find and buy.

 

Newsfax showed me how I could shift photo/cards further from photography and closer to poetry. (The pack leader for me is Kitasono Katue.)

 

I was OK with the numbers, but I paid attention to other things more. More important because they were changing times inside my head and most likely my heart.

 

The broadside subscriber list was mentioned earlier but only for its demographics, and they were vague and incomplete at that. I want to mention emotional demographics, harder yet to collect honestly. The truth is, I always sent my mail to people that wouldn’t bite. It was not the bite I feared, but the fear of rejection. I didn’t pursue people I knew to be harsh judges, critical in sum and detail.

 

The Sudden Horse picture was taken in October, 2001, in Spain. It was first printed one month later, on November 28th in the darkroom of our apartment in New York City.

         

At the 2001 printing of the Sudden Horse, two prints 8 x 10" were produced. They were not addressed to anyone or made for anyone (other than for my own [photographic] pleasure). In the November & December 2006 printings 65 pictures of the same Sudden Horse image were produced in a 4 x 6" size. Under the photo 4 words (in 2 pairs) were rubber stamped; the first pair above the second pair with a black line between them. The words were SUDDEN HORSE &JOYFUL GIFT. The verso of the card was formatted as a postcard, with areas for name & address of the recipient, &postage stamps; & a section for the sender’s message. On the verso of these cards a  holiday greeting  –the same words for all recipients– was rubber stamped. I prepared about 45 cards (out of the total 65) in the same way & during the month of December mailed them.

 

I did not change, add, move or remove, any material object that was in view during the first instant of my awareness of the horse. But my contact sheet clearly shows that I took three pictures, all of them from behind the closed front door (glass) (I am remembering now) of an antique shop. But I did move, did rearrange & adjust myself so that I could include something at the very right hand edge of the frame without noticeably changing anything else in the camera’s viewfinder. The reason for this was thought-out before I made any of the shots, because my intention was to make a picture of a horse as it first presented itself to my eyes. It seemed uncannily alive, very active, as if trying to flee, to escape. I knew that this was not reality, could not be verified. The horse was not real, not breath, nor bone, but wood. Yet in the first half of a split second of encountering it, confronting it, was a real experience. From inside the store, as I walked toward the brightly, sunlit window of the door– the horse was real, was alive & escaping. In order to “capture” that reality I would have to recreate it, unable to use exactly, precisely what was present when the horse was most alive to me. I would need to move myself, rearrange myself slightly (not the material reality, not only the camera) –to re-position my body, enough to include a sliver of the door frame along the full right hand edge of the viewfinder frame. With this change as an enhancement of a replay I could “photographically” give back to the horse the semblance to real life that I had experienced just a few seconds earlier.  

 

Though this kind of enhancement exists & is commonly accepted, a “pure” street photographer  (if one could be found) would have some questions & many objections to allowing my horse photo to be classified (without challenge) as street photography.

 

I made lists of words, singly & in pairs, when I was in the darkroom working with the horse picture (not yet named “sudden”); Because so many cards were made over 3 long printing sessions much time was spent with that image. But the collecting of words as possible titles continued even outside the darkroom. It was not an obsession, but at moments, felt that way : I wanted to get the right words. What did “right” words mean? Eventually I shortened the list of 4, found a placement & configuration that also looked right. I can’t say more about why I put them –picture & words together– as I did. I would not disagree with what you wrote about the title adding lyricism to the mix; less inclined to agree about the dry humor here (but certainly I like that characteristic anywhere it’s apt & that I can make it fit).  But yes! I’d love to think that ”we should somehow be able to read what we can see.” (Wouldn't that make a good banner or even a flag to fly above the Poetry Arena?)

 

I think I need to introduce here a more Serious idea, one that I would defend seriously, when necessary. It’s an idea that I first took seriously when reading material by the photographer & archivist Paul Vanderbilt. I discovered him for myself in the early 1970s. I have a collection of his writing from which I gathered quotations that were helpful in thinking & talking about photography. And of course when taking & making photographs. I used them when ask for statement to be used for exhibitions or with photographs that were being published. There were a few quotations that were so important to me, that if  they were short enough, I would memorize them. Now that was a memorable feat for me because I have been able to memorize almost nothing. Not even if given a school assignment to learn a very short speech in a Shakespeare play. Reading Vanderbilt  –essays, introductions to photography monographs, papers for scholarly quarterlies, essays on his own work–was revelatory. I know of (& have) only one book of  his, with text & photos. All of these I read & reread. They are rich & thoughtful & singular & I think I have made good use of them.

 

On first thinking about ways to respond to your interview questions I considered gathering Vanderbilt quotations, those that seemed apt for “answers”. These quotes, if chosen with enough thought & care, linked or threaded together with minimal transitional remarks, could be adopted by me as a personal statement. And I like to think of photographs as quotations from the real world. When I mentioned the notion of using Vanderbilt quotations as a basis of my answer to your questions, Martine said immediately, with no hesitation “Then that would turn the interview into an essay about Paul Vanderbilt. That’s not what you were invited to do.” Of course she is right. Nevertheless I will keep Vanderbilt in the wings, so to speak. Some of his ideas, & many of his words have been of great help to me.

 

Paul Vanderbilt boldly admitted that his interest in photographs –those of others as well as his own– was in how they could be used. His interest, based on use, included all types of photography. His own work blended “documentary” (but not I would say “photojournalism”) with “art” photography.

 

When I reached the section above about Paul Vanderbilt, the temptation to use quotations from his writings was insidiously attractive. I realized that Martine’s comment was right & to write about him would derail my part in your interview project.

 

By finding & using 2 quotations of his that I like  –that lit up the inside of my head & have lasted as an influence  on what I do– by bringing Paul Vanderbilt into the picture, I will save many pages of reading for you;  much scrolling down for those screen readers of ODD, & a lot of writing for me. Using the shortcut is worth all that; don’t you think?

 

"I submit that the end-product of intuitive personal photography is not a picture at all, but the offspring of pictures as enriched language."
 

"I often wish there were some way in which a photograph could go directly to its intended target, like a welcome letter or telephone call, directly to a specific person at the precise moment that a recipient is ready for it."
 

MÁRTON: Thank you very much for your answer, Roy! I think that the quotations are very appropriate, and we are back to the directness of the work, so here is the documentation of another“call” from you, which also arrived at the right moment, like, somehow, most of your poems, not necesarily because I was ready for them, and not necessarily because I was not: