Lisa Huffaker on her contributions to the Diode anthology, Beyond the Frame
"WHEN MY FATHER’S POLAROID CAMERA delivered pictures that 'turned out badly,' I always secretly loved the spectral flare, the dreamlike distortion of color. In her Wrecked Archive, Patty Paine pushes the material strangeness of Polaroid film beyond recognizable images into that kaleidoscopic dreamworld glowing at the edges of so many pictures from my childhood. I responded to her partial undoing of the images by wrecking them further, then reconstituting them as visual poetry. While a Polaroid camera spits out a chemically active stack of layers that must be peeled apart, my work was to fuse half-disintegrated layers back together. I cut into laser prints of Paine’s Wrecked images with a knife and layered them over pages from Light and Film, a 1970 volume from Time Life Library of Photography, to reveal poetry I’d created by staring at the text until my mind had dissolved all unnecessary words. It is often said that photography stops time; in this anthology, poetry is an alchemical agent, returning the image to time, decay, and, while we have it, a bright window of meaning."
—Lisa Huffaker
In Beyond the Frame, poets respond to vintage abandoned photographs, and to the experimental, abstract images that were created from the photographs. The anthology features a multiplicity of voices, styles and perspectives. Like Allan Sekula in his meditation on a found triptych of photos, the abandoned images in Beyond the Frame appear “in an almost archaeological light.” Like Sekula, the poets sought to discover “What meanings were once constructed here ... who spoke, who listened, who spoke with a voice not their own?”
The following are Beyond the Frame pages from Light and Film, from Life Library of Photography (Time-Life Books, 1970), overlaid with laser-printed images, cut with an Exacto knife and altered with white ink and Prismacolor pencils.
LISA HUFFAKER creates poetry, collage, assemblage, artist’s books, and many combinations of these. Her poetry appears in diode, 32 Poems, Michigan Quarterly Review, CTRL+V, DIAGRAM, Cincinnati Review, THRUSH, Phoebe, and other journals. She was recently a finalist for Dallas Poet Laureate, and leads community writing projects as Teaching Artist in Residence at the Writer’s Garret. Her work as a teaching artist brings her to the Dallas Museum of Art, Nasher Sculpture Center, and The Dallas Contemporary, where creation and destruction duke it out in her bookish workshops. Her award-winning project, White Rock Zine Machine, offers tiny books of poetry and art through sculptural vending machines. Her assemblages have recently been exhibited at Ro2 Art and Bath House Cultural Center. She is currently working on a book of visual poetry, transforming an anti-feminist “self help” book from 1963 through collage and poetic erasure. Cornell Tech and Delft University of Technology recently exhibited her manuscript-in-progress in their 3rd Workshop on Obfuscation. She comes from a background of classical singing; she holds a master’s degree in vocal performance from the New England Conservatory, and sings with The Dallas Opera. Find her online at lisahuffaker.com.
In Beyond the Frame, poets respond to vintage abandoned photographs, and to the experimental, abstract images that were created from the photographs. The anthology features a multiplicity of voices, styles and perspectives. Like Allan Sekula in his meditation on a found triptych of photos, the abandoned images in Beyond the Frame appear “in an almost archaeological light.” Like Sekula, the poets sought to discover “What meanings were once constructed here ... who spoke, who listened, who spoke with a voice not their own?”
