#AFFellow Ahren Warner has been selected for this year’s Bloomberg New Contemporaries! Warner was awarded his fellowship for poetry in 2012 and writes:
“I came to making films and photographs through, or preceded by, my work as a poet. In a 2014 lecture, the French poet Yves Bonnefoy argued that photography “bears directly on what poetry seeks to be” (Yves Bonnefoy. Poésie et photographie. Paris: Galilée, 2014). That – because of its ability to capture the ‘real’ and the necessity of ‘chance’ – photography “deflects the aim of what we call composition… present[ing] things existing as such in an existence beyond that which is reducible to thought” (Bonnefoy, 2014).
In this way, Bonnefoy sees photography as an outrider for a poetics that seeks to “rattle… the scaffolds of conceptual thought” (Bonnefoy, 2014). There’s a lot to digest in this: it intersects with plenty of *cool art theory* – new materialism, Quentin Meillassoux and Peter Osborne’s differing readings of ‘finitude’ – but there’s also a way in which it feels like a kind of outmoded, or romantic, idea of the photograph and poem. What, for example, of the networks of social and political determination that condition what is found within the photographic frame or the language and form of a poem?”
Read more on the New Contemporaries website.