The Peripheral Space of Photography

This profound, short essay by poet and translator Murat Nemet-Nejat explores whatseparatess 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 thefocala 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 Question 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. Nemet-Netjat lives in Hoboken, New Jersey.