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, hes 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.
Where spirits tread so lightly that their feet, transparent as the air, make no more mark on the ground than the air itself…
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
Ever simple but we so often miss, all our chaos
can be pared down to this, pared down to this moment of bliss
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
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.
Flit from one threshold to another nosing each of them like a stray.
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.
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.
How we would tease each other to try on our frozen belongings, that found places on the basement clothesline, to thaw into eventual warmth.
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.
We live in sod huts and sell boot scrapers door to door. Desire weighs steady while dignity fleets.
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.
But you did not want to be the wife of an old man. You wept. All around you was a swamp.
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.
Weaver,
I learned to hang sorrows on a bird’s wing, while the heavy heart put up its little sail.
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."
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
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.
The weak they feel a growing distance between themselves and what they love
