Night Contact invited open submissions from photographers/artists to respond to one of four lines of text provided by four independent judges. Four curators – Thurston Moore, Esther Teichmann, Rebecca Norris Webb and Anne Bourgeois-Vignon – each selected a line of text with personal resonance for them to respond to.
Entrants submitted images for one of the four texts, and in turn each judge selected and edited a selection of the submitted images into a slideshow. Each slideshow is a visual representation and interpretation of the curator’s original text. The project explores the ambiguity of the image, how meaning can be constructed through a layer of participants, and the active role of the viewer.
Rebecca Norris Webb, photographer and poet, asked photographers to respond to this text and has created a slideshow entitled “Tell it Slantâ€:
“You can see beauty only from the side, hastily.†(Tomas Transtromer, from the poem Under Pressure)
Rebecca has further played with this concept by selecting 5 images and responding to the image with a line of text. The fourth in this series can be seen below:
“[Poetry has taught me] that there’s such a thing as truth and it can be told—slant.â€
—Irish Nobel Prize winning poet, Seamus Heaney, from an interview with Dennis O’Driscoll in the book Stepping Stones
©Sharon Boothroyd, “If you get married again, will you still love me?†UK, 2011