Night Contact

REBECCA NORRIS WEBB – “TELL IT SLANT” #2

17th October 2014

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 Slant”:

“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 second in this series can be seen below:

 

“[I prefer] the always-more-successful surrealism of everyday life… its peripheral vision of whatever it is one can never really see full face.”

U.S. poet, Elizabeth Bishop, in a letter to Anne Stevenson

 

©IAN JONES, “Whale Café,” Iceland, 2014