Photography as poetry and poetry as photography: on Arthur Omar and Arturo

Abstract

The text approaches the “grinding of the sense” performed by photography in a poem of Arturo Carrera (Coronel Pringles, Argentina, 1948), Fotografías imaginarias con nieve de verdad, and by a series of portraits by Arthur Omar (Poços de Caldas, Minas Gerais, 1948), Anthropology of the glorious face (Antropologia da face gloriosa). In Carrera it is about “melted” images corresponding to the “dissipative structures” that caracterize his poetry, according to Laddaga, whose language is tilted in the name of a subtle “agrammaticality”, and, in Omar, the “faceness” violated in exuberant tactile images. To Omar’s expressionist faces the series of portraits Niños… que nacieron peinados by Alfredo Prior (Buenos Aires, 1952) functions as a counterpoint, which are mixed to fragments of poems by Carrera in the album of the same title.