Real fire knows neither dignity nor pride when courted by the angels of the wind
 

Real Fire

a suite of photographs & poems
by
Richard Baron & Janet Hamill

METROPOLITAN 

Pressing against glass     so it would pass
the car made its way     
up Metropolitan     pieces of news print
under a magnifying glass    
taking a beating from the sun     like everyone    
I was a passenger     at the end of an eon
a building burned    
in the rear view mirror

Some days you and I go mad     hearts break    minds snap

Snakes coiled in the sky     looking for means
to gauge angels in multitudes    
in the windows     nameless shepherds
of the trees of the hills
wheeling through cross streets    
and chain link lots     lying in wings
on star-grazed stone    
dust at the back of my throat

We can’t go the old way     so we change     our lives pivot

Pages open to the psalms of ache
on either side of the avenue    
variants of old heavens      through wrought iron
fencing     cold     colorless     marble     angels
with sculpted curls     came down
from their plinths     their guarded vaults
to douse the flames
in my hair and eyes

Some days you and I go mad
Hearts break, minds snap.
We can’t go the old way, so
we change.   Our lives pivot
forming a mysterious geometry.

--Janet Hamill

 

RICHARD BARON is a conceptual photographer less interested in documenting reality than examining how it differs from its appearance. In a review of his work in the NY Times, photography critic Andy Grundberg noted that Baron's work is concerned with the limits of resolution and recognition, and it asks the viewer to consider how images acquire meaning.

Baron is a past recipient of a grant from the New York State Council on the Arts and his work is represented in The Sam Wagstaff Collection at The J. Paul Getty Museum in Los Angeles, The San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, The Houston Museum of Fine Art, The New York Public Library, The Museum of the City of New York, and numerous private collections.  He has published and exhibited widely, including a one-person show at DiverseWorks in Houston during FotoFest.

Baron currently resides in Santa Fe, New Mexico.  More of his work can be seen at http://www.baronrichard.com/  and his email is here.

JANET HAMILL is a surrealist poet whose work has been compared to Baudelaire, Breton, Neruda and Rimbaud.  Like Rimbaud, she can express a “more-than-human intensity and transcendence of limits” by working “the borderland between rationality and dreaming,” the mundane and the sublime.  Her work is characterized by its strange and wonderful imagery, its oneiric and odic qualities.

Hamill is the author of five collections of poetry and short fiction - Body of Water, Lost Ceilings, Nostalgia of the Infinite, The Temple, and Troublante.   She has released two CDs of spoken word and music in collaboration with the band Moving Star - Flying Nowhere and Genie of the Alphabet.  Her work has been nominated for a Pushcart Prize and the Poetry Society of America’s William Carlos Williams Prize.  She presently serves as an instructor and member of the Board of Advisors at the Northeast Poetry Center’s College of Poetry in New York’s Hudson Valley. 

Hamill can be emailed here and her website is http://www.janethamill.com/.

 

 

Real Fire
by
Maureen Owen

Who is there that at one time or another hasn’t sat, transfixed, gazing into the quixotic flames of a fireplace, the crackling blaze of the solitary campfire, or at the flame ballet of a beach bonfire.  The visual image of fire grips us with the hypnotic charm of the weaving cobra and the spinning magician’s eye, enraptures us with its unpredictable beauty,  terrifies with its ravaging potential. Fire so luminous, so devouring, so shape-changing, so feverish.  Fire, in whose flutterings and bursts, we see or think we see, shapes and shadows of portents of things to come, abandoned angels, stories untold, messages from the aether. 

In Real Fire Janet Hamill’s poesis present a collaboration with Richard Baron’s photographs that is at once inherent, predestined, spiritual, and elemental.  Those familiar with Hamill’s work have long been aware of her connections to a powerful, other-worldly side of nature.  Hers is a visionary landscape that can only be reached by her trance-inducing text that lifts the veil of the mundane and exposes a dreamscape ecstasy of muscular, yet ethereal, visions. The language of her geography combines a visceral reality with images more brilliant, more mythical, more alchemical, more dramatic, more mysterious, more riveting, and more intense, than it would seem any reality could hold. She creates a parallel world that we enter, and wonder if, indeed it truly is a parallel world, or if we are in our same world, seeing it only now as it actually is.

In this collaborative collection Hamill moves her text within the form of the fire itself. Her words take on the conflagrant quality of Baron’s counterparts. The images of the poems’ language race breathlessly toward us with such force and fury, we expect them to burn up before our very eyes as we read.  Like the shapes and shadows we think we see in fire’s burning, her particulars transmogrify into “Snakes coiled in the sky,” “Cities lit from within,” “Stallions standing in blood.” All the faces of incandescence emerge in this tempest of surreal-existential searching. We experience a poetics both metaphysical and mysterious, and yet as familiar as the physical flame it embodies. 

A modern wizard of the lyrical vision, Hamill salutes Rimbaud rising from the fire’s arms and in another poem, Flame, a calligram mirroring of the photographs, she creates a burning homage to Apollinaire. In Fire Worshippers Hamill recounts a strange visionary journey of a pagan peoples’ first encounter with fire. In this mythological narrative, when fire first fell to the earth the people were in awe of fire. In her masterful fashion Hamill narrates, “They gave it a name worthy of its wonder.” One could say the same of this collection of poems and its collaborative magic.

 

Real Fire
by
Christian Gerstheimer

The need for warmth is part of the human condition. Prometheus’ gift has been an essential part of life since pre-history, but in an era defined by electricity few peer into flaming embers and ponder existence.  Not unless an inquisitive mind looks at the all-too-familiar and asks “what if?” does one chance upon poignant, meaningful discoveries. This is precisely what Richard Baron has done with his photographs On Fire.

Most photographs of fire usually state the obvious, but Baron’s capture the element in motion, freezing it for the viewer’s delight. The flames take on a painterly quality appearing almost as if they were brushstrokes due to their soft and graceful curves. By photographing fire Baron returns to the beginnings of photography, when photography was about exploring the effects of light on a light sensitive surface.

Baron approaches his subject as a subjective photographer, as Alfred Stieglitz did with his Equivalents. Each photograph in the On Fire series is from the same angle in the same setting forcing the viewer to notice the flames’ abstract quality, natural perfection and infinite variation. One might ask “Are the On Fire photographs Baron’s Equivalents?” Is Baron seeking to attain technical and the aesthetic perfection?  Stieglitz "wanted to photograph clouds to find out what he had learned in forty years about photography,” and “through clouds to put down” his “philosophy of life …”  For Stieglitz clouds were a “Neutral, and abstract, non subject- constantly changing, physical phenomena that nothing anchored to everyday experience.” Although Baron approaches fire in much the same way as Stieglitz, Baron’s approach is more conceptual.

Baron has an affinity for photographing subjects that are transitory and for emphasizing the abstract qualities of representational subjects. Baron’s work straddles modernism and postmodernism, is about aesthetics and formalism, and yet each of the On Fire photographs shows the same subject at nearly the same scale from a documentarian point of view. The photographs seem to investigate the temporal, something disappearing and ethereal, the fire not growing or receding, but rather varying its forms as a result of its shape-shifting character. Baron is not trying to show that fire ignites and dwindles down or that it is hot to the touch. All learn that at an early age. His study On Fire reminds one of the natural beauties of fire, but also that there is magic in fire, the result of a chemical change that releases heat and light.

Also notable is Baron’s use of darkness. Darkness too is part of every photograph, and light in the darkness is a well-known symbol of hope and salvation. One finds abundant metaphorical meaning in the On Fire photographs.   Swedish naturalist and theologian, Emanuel Swedenborg said "Love in its essence is spiritual fire." Baron’s veil-like photographs of fire are easily identified as metaphors for love’s pulsating heart-beats, the artist’s spirit,  or mortality, extinguished at the blink of an eye.