Poet of Light: The Photography of Amy Friend

 

Left:

Before the War. 2014

Right: 
It Could Be Anywhere. 2017

BETWEEN WORDS & IMAGES

While the focus of this blog has been on visual poetry, the recent work of Canadian artist Amy Friend has caused me to reconsider this. Her Dare Alla Luce series (which has pleasantly haunted me for some time) has always read to me like an image based form of poetry, so this post is a thought experiment of sorts. Dare Alla Luce (translated from Italian as Giving to the Light) is a startlingly unique confluence of photography, drawing (with light!) and editing/curating. While these photographs are very much about memory and senescence, they are also a poetic form of meta-photography as seen in their self-reflexive nature. In this manner she establishes a dialogue or conversation with the long-gone unknown photographers (the artist's words here), one in which she uses the medium itself to interrogate its own history, material and nature. A deep rumination on time, the precious precariousness of life, family and the nature of memory, Friend's masterful economy of means ties it to concrete poetry and haiku. 

While the loose visual structure in the Dare All Luce photos suggest they have little in common with the rigid compositional form haiku is known for, these works connect with several key elements of this poetic tradition. As a distillative form, Haiku features brevity and precision and we see this in the sparse nature of Friend's works in which the only presence of the artists' hand are the precise holes punctured into the found photographs used in their creation (click HERE & HERE for more on her technique). These punctures that allow light through creating varying sized "stars" are organized in simple clusters in a focused and uncluttered manner.

Traditionally a haiku focuses on a fleeting and clearly highlighted moment — often seen in emotional or seasonal shifts held in a still moment of time. In similar fashion Friend's photographs are centred on the quiet-frozen moments of the lives of anonymous individual's lives captured in antique photos. The deftly placed star-formed constellation overlays expand the depictions of everyday life into an expansive and contemplative space. 

Friend also echoes haiku's suggestive ethos in her work by creating an open-ended non-explanatory space. We see this in the anonymity of her subjects while the star formations resonate with ambient narrative potential. The intimacy of human moments captured in domestic photographs juxtaposed with the tractless space of the cosmos also echoes haiku's traditional suggestion of natural and/or seasonal references, all of which suggests humanity's minute presence in a vast universe.

THE ENDLESS NOW

While the elements of concrete poetry that resonate in Friend's Dare Alla Luce series are subtle, they are nonetheless profound. A key element of these images is the scattered star-forms populating the picture-plane like punctuation, perhaps like a poem composed with light instead of words. Like concrete poetry these "stars" are arranged in a manner that accentuates compositional form visually creating rhythm. Eschewing (yet oddly simultaneously embracing) representation these photographs are a space where light itself functions as a language.

Friend's work also suggests metaphor in powerful and poetic ways. By unifying stars and portraits (or sea and landscapes) her work quietly suggests temporal and emotional spaces — all of which avoids the assertion of thematic singularity. Like all good poetry her work hinges on nuance. These images conflated with celestial bodies centre on form and visuality that suggest meaning. Like words voided of grammar, these stars are held for the viewer in a compositional space that is, like a text that is visually "read". These works oscillate quietly with a luminous yet subtle intensity, like that of an elliptical poem.

BETWEEN CREATION & DESTRUCTION

In addition to it's poetic depths the Dare Alla Luce series is also clearly aligned with the ideas of Walter Benjamin as outlined in The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction. Friend's puncturing of the antique photos (so that light passes through them) permanently transforms discarded mechanically manufactured images. This detritus of culture and families morphs into unique objects. Benjamin felt that mechanical reproduction of images (magazines, photographs, prints) diminished the power and "aura" of an art object, whereas Friend's handcrafted objects create singularity thus countering photography’s tendency toward replication.

Benjamin saw history as a fragmentary continuum, a space of creation and destruction, with photographs acting as dialectical images (click HERE & HERE for more on dialectical images) where past and present collide. Friend's work here energizes these archival family/cultural artifacts, and in so doing converts them into poetic objects of engaging power. In this manner they transform from ruminative objects into contemplative spaces. Friend enacts Benjamin's dialectic of destruction and creation; damaging them to transform and preserve them; suddenly a medium known for endless reproduction becomes a star-like transcendent singularity.

PUNCTUM: the wounding moment (a conclusion?)

The affective force of these works becomes especially apparent through sustained proximity. Living with two of them, I am always impressed by their emotional heft. Like many viewers of a certain generation, I maintain a personal archive of family photographs—stored in boxes, albums, and books—that preserves a lineage of faces both familiar (and unknown, most of the photographers as well). This private collection operates as a constellation of ancestry and estrangement. The images in Dare Alla Luce activate this constellation, prompting reflections on memory, absence, and the shifting material status of the photographic image.

In addition to evoking time, absence, and loss, I have begun to consider the broader emotional space that family photographs occupy in our lives and whether this has shifted in the digital age. Photographs are now ubiquitous—endlessly reproducible and transferable—and we possess more visual documentation of our lives than at any point since the invention of photography. Yet the power of the domestic image may be diluted by its amorphous existence in digital space; the vast majority of photographs are never printed, framed, or placed in albums.

With this in mind, I recall Roland Barthes’s concept of the punctum—the “wounding moment”—from Camera Lucida. While Friend’s puncturing of photographs is deliberate, rather than the accidental detail Barthes describes, the work similarly foregrounds emotional response, fragmentary meaning, and an inviting absence that privileges affect over fixed interpretation.

IN PARTING

Lastly, in the generous spirit of Friend's bringing new life (and light) into the old photographs shared in Dare Alla Luce I share here my own simple cross-fade animation (with quiet soundtrack) of a sequence of portrait images from her series. A gesture that I hope will quietly add to her conversation with these long forgotten photographers and individuals.

Compendium: Dare Alla Luce. 2026