A Meditation on Poetry and Photography

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Notes

1 For full poem see Atwood, “This Is a Photograph of Me” in Selected Poems 1965–1975, 8.

2 For a useful summary of connections between photographs and death in the critical literature on photography, see Ari J. Blatt's, “The Interphototextual Dimension of Annie Ernaux and Marc Marie's “L'usage de la photo.”

3 In an interview, Horn makes the point in a matter of fact way: “I thought I would shoot the Seine or the Garonne, but these rivers don't have the same energy. I don't know how many people kill themselves in the Seine but it just didn't look like a convincing suicide route to me. The Thames has the interesting fact attached to it that it is the urban river with the highest appeal to foreign suiciders. So you get people coming in from Paris to kill themselves in the Thames” (“Water: Interview”).