In and Out of Context

In and Out of Context:

Photographs by Tim White With Excerpts from 21 Northland Writers

To Andrea

Foreword As a critic and editor, I regularly wrote features on photographers—mostly, by preference, those who engaged with photography’s evidentiary nature: people like Tom Arndt and Chris Faust, Terry Gydesen and Wing Young Huie, Xavier Tavera and Regina Flanagan.

I recognized in Tim White’s work that it had the elegiac aesthetic of, say, Joanne Verberg but that it combined this with the helpless engagement with the human and mortal condition that characterizes the work of the photographers I mention above. His work continues the spare, compelled recognition of the human body in the grip of its dual nature: an animal in the natural world; a mind or soul in a world of human making.

In part because of White’s engagement with the art of photography as a social practice—a practice that uses it to illuminate, as only photography can, the literal situation of the embodied human in the world—he has not taken his work down a careerist road. By using his photographic practice to engage others in visual conversation on the human condition, he’s created the climate that creates his work. In this project, he has again turned to a creative community, eliciting language from poets and writers of several stripes that are paired with his images.

His intent, I think, has been neither to illustrate the writing with images nor to explain images with writing, but to simply pose them in a mutual relation, like passersby whose gazes meet. The relation is mutual, undefined, and open. It can happen over and over again, different each time.

— Ann Klefstad

When the wind is right you can hear, even at this distance, the crying of those who have fallen and are unable to rise.

Louis Jenkins, from "Sommersault," The Winter Road, 2004

Where spirits tread so lightly that their feet, transparent as the air, make no more mark on the ground than the air itself…

Linda LeGarde Grover, from The Road Back to Sweetgrass, 2014

For breakfast, I’ll serenade you with the sunrise and the only promise I can keep: I will take you for granted It will be effortless Kat Mandeville, from "I Get You," Spider Country, 2012

Ever simple but we so often miss, all our chaos can be pared down to this, pared down to this moment of bliss Gaelynn Lea, from "Moment of Bliss," Imperfecta, 2012

the last word out of my mouth was "happy" and we drifted off to sleep two friends, wind chime nymphs licking dry time, rhyme water and flame Mary Bue, from "Slander Stallion," Where the Monarchs Circled, 2000

The pillow, the sheets and me.

And I know nothing else i feel today will be this good.

I yearn for only this.

Uninterrupted Calm.

Softness to meet my edges.

Faith King, original composition, 2015

Flit from one threshold to another nosing each of them like a stray.

Jill Hinners, from "How to Enter a Home That Won’t Last," 2014

On the hottest night of the Summer, you might drive by the field where your grandma’s house used to stand. You might see a child in the tall grass running towards the alley.

You’ll swear it is you.

Chris Monroe, from Violet Days, "The Ghosts of Late Summer," 2004

Hot meets cool, smoothly slipping through the barriers of controlled restraint.

Its wetness welcome, thirst controls the flow of it, deep draughts cool the heat.

Cecilia Lieder, from "Summer Evening," Response, 2006

How we would tease each other to try on our frozen belongings, that found places on the basement clothesline, to thaw into eventual warmth.

Liz Minette, from "October Lines," November, 2015

The lake pushes ice into cathedrals the leaves are gone from the trees along the highway they just stand like skeleton bones pushed into the sand My home is where my love abides.

Charlie Parr, from "Temperance River Blues," Stumpjumper, 2015

We live in sod huts and sell boot scrapers door to door.

Desire weighs steady while dignity fleets.

Paul Lundgren, original composition, 2015

I. Thought. It. Would. Be. Different. To. Embrace. The. Hate.

Robert Dewitt Adams, from "Emphasis Added," Aqueous Vol. 8, 2015

She said "White men rule the world." and we drove on in silence.

Finally stopped for gas outside Marquette. She went inside to pay.

"Genetic superiority is fleeting," I said to no one.

Bob Monahan, original composition, 2015

But you did not want to be the wife of an old man.

You wept. All around you was a swamp.

Jim Johnson, from "And the White Pines Grow Old as the Sky," A Field Guide to Blueberries, 2004

The broad strokes, upstream, Dutch flea markets, folds in hotel sheets, rasthofs, riparians, spider webs across the path, kicking stones, skipping stones, striped stones, beneath buzzards, the blackened bottoms of my pots and pans.

Ben Weaver, from “Places I searched for you,” Ragged Ass Joy, 2015

I learned to hang sorrows on a bird’s wing, while the heavy heart put up its little sail.

Jane Whitledge, from "Blessings," A Pilgrim's Notebook, 2011

Learning again to live with uneasy fear… I straightened up, bundled up, loaded up, and walked slowly down the aisle. We waited, then finally moved ahead. I stepped slowly off the train and touched the ground of "home."

Sue [Lorenzi] Sojourner with Cheryl Reitan, from Thunder of Freedom, 2013

You go round and round Keep falling on the same hard ground Brush the dirt off of your knees Someone call the doctor please And heal those deep bruises, deep Rachael Kilgour, from "Deep Bruises," 2015

You are just under the surface of my restless sleep.

I hear your ardent whispers in these howling winds that blow in my ears, tell me stories I cannot repeat.

Ellie Schoenfeld, from "The Equator is only an Imaginary Line," the dark honey, 2009

The weak they feel a growing distance between themselves and what they love Ryan Vine, from "Rules 6, 19, and 20," Revolver, 11.13.2012

Acknowledgements With profound gratitude to Ann Klefstad, Louis Jenkins, Linda LeGarde Grover, Kat Mandeville, Gaelynn Lea, Mary Bue, Faith King, Jill Hinners, Chris Monroe, Cecilia Lieder, Liz Minette, Charlie Parr, Paul Lundgren, Robert Dewitt Adams, Bob Monahan, Jim Johnson, Ben Weaver, Jane Whitledge, Sue [Lorenzi] Sojourner, Cheryl Reitan, Rachael Kilgour, Ellie Schoenfeld, Ryan Vine, the Arrowhead Regional Arts Council, and to my friend/Virgilian guide–John Steffl.

Designed by Catherine Meier Binding by Jon Hinkel