To illustrate

Photography at its best is visual poetry. Both written and visual forms depend on insight, intuition, a love for and a deep interest in the world and the life within it. They're meanings are revealed and concealed at the same time, they're open to interpretation and offer fragmentary glimpses in to something we can never fully know. This enables us to bring our own life experiences to them and so they mean different things to different people. What you get out of a  poem or a photograph has a lot to do with what you bring to them

Two roads diverged in a yellow wood,
And sorry I could not travel both
And be one traveler, long I stood
And looked down one as far as I could
To where it bent in the undergrowth;

Then took the other, as just as fair,
And having perhaps the better claim,
Because it was grassy and wanted wear;
Though as for that the passing there
Had worn them really about the same,

And both that morning equally lay
In leaves no step had trodden black.
Oh, I kept the first for another day!
Yet knowing how way leads on to way,
I doubted if I should ever come back.

I shall be telling this with a sigh
Somewhere ages and ages hence:
Two roads diverged in a wood, and
I took the one less traveled by,
And that has made all the difference.

Robert Frost.


I've seen Robert Frosts poem photo illustrated many many times and always with a shot of a fork in the road or two paths in a wood. That's not visual poetry, that's illustration. Photography is more than that and it would never be two roads that I think of first when reading Frosts poem

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Mark Steinmetz

Sean