Scriptural Diptychs

Marcel Duchamp demonstrated through his art piece, Fountain, that context is everything. A beautiful nude that is captioned as “The Breasts of Venice” will be perceived by the viewer much differently than if the very same photograph had been captioned “Breast Cancer Awareness.” There have been a relatively few number of works that have tried employing text as a way to enhance images. One of them, The Poet’s Camera, set off poetry from photographs in order to “interpret the mood or meaning of each picture directly or by inflection, rather than to match pictorial with literary subjects, to the end that one should enhance the other in clarity, significance and form.”

This series has taken a different approach. Ralph Gibson describes his double imaged diptychs this way: “They function as a point of departure into subsequent thoughts that cannot be directly accessed.” Unlike the poems in The Poet’s Camera, the text is not meant to enhance the image, but stands against it, creating a more certain tension than what could be had with two images alone.

This page contains examples from the work.
The project is ongoing.