Life Forms: Photographing Metaphor

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Barry Sheinkopf has been writing poetry, as well as novels and nonfiction, for decades. In the early 1970s, his poems began to contain fewer and fewer words. He was producing tanka and haiku, and not being pleased with the results, when finally it dawned on him that he really wanted to make poems with no words at all. This, for a writer, is something of a dilemma. He tried to resolve it by picking up the first of a series of cameras, in 35-millimeter and 4x5 formats, and attempting to photograph the metaphors he saw all around him. His goal from the first has been to capture these exceptional moments in the life around him. If you know that you’re looking at a photograph, he says-something that you know is real-but can’t momentarily identify it, your sense of the world will be enlarged a little when you suddenly realize what it is and exclaim, Aha! This book, then, records a quest for ways of apprehending the visual world that has never ended for him-of seeing into the life of forms, to help his viewers grasp that there are metaphors in everyday experience. Barry Sheinkopf’s photographs have appeared in shows across the northeast United States.