The Peripheral Space Of Photography

This profound, short essay by poet and translator Murat Nemet-Nejat explores what separates photography from other artistic media. Nemet-Nejat argues that photographic seeing is not a plastic experience, but a meditative one built around a relationship between image and words. Through a critique of photographs in the Metropolitan Museum of Art exhibition of 1993, he shows repeatedly how the -focal points in photographs are often their mistakes (blurs, over-or-under exposures, etc.) and, spatially, exist in their peripheries.

Among Murat Nemet-Nejat's works are the essay "Questions of Accent" and the poems "Turkish Voices." He also translated Turkish poet Ece Ayhan's "A Blind Cat Black" and "Orthodoxies," published by Sun & Moon Press. He lives in Hoboken, New Jersey.