Photographer Robynne Limoges shares evocative images inspired by the haiku form, in her pursuit of the ‘philosophical dilemma of how much light is required to dispel darkness and just how it is to be found and held close.’
620 words: estimated reading time 2.5 minutes + 1 minute gallery
In WB Yeats’ The Second Coming, he begins:
“Turning and turning in the widening gyre
The falcon cannot hear the falconer;
Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold;
Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world,
The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere
The ceremony of innocence is drowned…”
Black Haiku: Poems for Dark Times is a series that I have been shooting for a long time. When I began the series I had been photographing nature only sporadically, but my increasing unease in the world led me to choose the natural world for tutoring. I tried to keep foremost in my mind the question of how I might distill the natural world’s organic profusion into minimal yet emotional imagery. Ultimately, I was looking for a means of relief from the constant grappling of humans against nature, an antidote to the high barometer of conflict, a specific visual approach that would suggest, not shout, that might lend a degree of quietude and a point of contemplation, a sotto voce conversation between ourselves and our world.
The concept for the title Black Haiku: Poems for Dark Times originates from my reverence for Japanese haiku. Haiku is a minimal poetic form that does not rhyme. It does not always comfort. It does not conclude. But it does distill. It does invite meditation on the luminance within the ordinary. Most importantly to me, it dwells upon the beating heart of place.
My hope is that the viewer will find that these images possess an enigmatic and emotional quality; that they will decipher my pursuit of the philosophical dilemma of how much light is required to dispel darkness and just how it is to be found and held close.
In the slideshow below, the images appear in the following sequence:
- Dialogue — The eternal contest: light against dark, chaos reigning, even under the glare of light, the solitude of reflection, the discourse, as in Plato’s Dialogues, on harmony of words and deeds.
- The Wave — The light is passing out of my sight, the cliff turns toward darkness, the sand/land liquifies, the waves roil.
- Constellation Haiku — A rain and lichen spattered pathway lit by storm, constructed beyond the limits of a tiny country graveyard no longer in use.
- The Way of Water — The way of water: the most invincible force of all, finding the path of least resistance. Climate is the new Fury, wreaking havoc, water increasingly becoming a force of chaos. And the lack of it erasing wider and wider swaths of life.
- Bird in Flight — I once wrote a poem whose first line was ‘In June on unfound lakes in Minnesota, there is a bird that flies below the water, so close to the surface it casts a shadow on the sky’. Manifested all those years later in breeze and sand, tide and the dance of light, I saw the shuddering wake of that bird’s path through a medium not its own.
- The Light is Impenetrable — A metaphorical image of the interlacing of myriad night tracers, blinding the sightline of those on duty at the edge of dark Vietnam billets.
Black Haiku: Poems for Dark Times
(For full screen slideshow, click at the top of image, left or right of centre)
(All images are © Robynne Limoges 2018 and are not to be reproduced or used without her written permission. Please contact her via her website at www.RobynneLimoges.com )
Find out more
Discover the full text of WB Yeats’ poem The Second Coming and more at The Poetry Foundation.
Robynne Limoges