“Art can no longer be merely a mirror, it must act as the organizer of the people’s consciousness… No form of representation is so readily comprehensible to the masses as photography.”

—El Lissitzky

I get around in a wheelchair. One day years ago, one of the front casters of my chair got pinned in a crack in the sidewalk, and I spilled out onto the ground. During the fall, the iPhone that I keep in my jacket pocket somehow managed to take a photo of its own accord, a photo of, well, nothing much. The image that popped up on the screen that day interested me in its blurred mundanity. I soon began taking photos of the world that surrounds me from this particular angle of a wheelchair, an angle that looks up at the lower third of the horizon or looks down at the ground, unlocking the closed door of distant close-ups.

I’m continually finding something of interest in the red wheelbarrow of the commonly unseen. The photograph as artifact: peeled paint, pigeon droppings, spilled detritus. History gone broke. As a poet, sometimes my photographer’s eye is particularly drawn to the word world—letters etched on the sewer cover, the stenciled curb, the label on the stanchion. “A poem is a small (or large) machine made of words,” writes William Carlos Williams. A poem results from craft, not sentiment. While some may find this concept difficult, it’s actually quite simple. My photographs encourage the viewer to look at the text rather than through it—to notice composition, color, light, and shadow, rather than plot.

In the words of Ezra Pound, my photos hope to “make it new.” Like my writing, my photos grow out of the experimental interests of the modernists, the New York School, the Objectivists, and the L=A=N=G=U=A=G=E poets. These avant-garde artists challenge expectations of genre, syntax, and meaning. All these poets focus upon the word as a thing, upon the notion that the writing on the page simply is what it is. My photographs expect nothing of the viewer other than to experience the sensory present, which might or might not be framed in the context of their own imagined past, hopes, or fears of the future. Often decontextualized extreme close-ups, the photos aim to challenge a system in which the viewer’s eye moves left to right, top to bottom, clockwise. The text—photograph or poem, thus tends to be non-linear and non-representational, simultaneous.  

In orchestration—how does this poem sound, how does this line connect to that one, how do the connotations of this word expand that allusion into the infinity; how does the photo reveal in a gesture the texture, the shade, the shifted shape? With the close-up the abstract made concrete:

The way 
the things

Upon one 
another bear.

The photos flinging us into the mix of intention and happenstance, the transient beauty in the shapes we adore, and the stuff we toss away. If an iota of rust can draw us to attention, then mathematically this means our awakening may be 10,000 times more of a wilderness than we believe. The photos ask us for a moment to hear a note of silence in the traffic . . .

Zooming in on the particulars, as we see in my recent book, There There Now, my work often grows out of the rhetorical tropes of framing, synecdoche, and juxtaposition. As opposed to seeking a relation to nostalgia, the photos and poems in the book arise from the all-around noise of our immediate existence. The fact of the photograph reflects the Japanese concept of “wabi-sabi,” or “the beautiful in the ugly.” The quotidian images of the ground, of rusted pipes, of brackets and keyholes, spent exposure. I’m not especially interested in registering the everyday comings and goings of humans. I figure that humans have had their say at this point, having crashed the natural environment: the Earth’s last gasp. Humans, after all, elected Donald Trump as the reckless dictator. The big, beautiful bill; the mad chainsaw, staged. Ukraine, Russia, Gaza, Israel. Artificial intelligence, enforced ignorance, the death of education.

What will it take to unhinge this dirt? The sound of the projection machine, black and white, a blaze of color. These silent “talkies” at last report record the paradox of objects. Snapped off the wrecked wheelchair, what beauty remains in the asphalt, now, after the marks and scars?

In remembrance of Sebastião Salgado (1944-2025) and Fanny Howe (1940-2025).

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Scott D. Bentley is a poet and photographer based in the San Francisco Bay Area, where he teaches writing at California State University East Bay. Often printing on metal or fabric as well as paper, he explores how the abstract becomes real through touch and decay. Bentley is the author of several poetry collections, including EDGE and Ground Air, and his recent hybrid works—There There Now and All Around Noise—bring together his photographs and poems in striking harmony.

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