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As Katelan will attest, the thought of maintaining a blog on a regular basis has, until now, always intimidated me from a sense of commitment, and the sheer amount of terrible writing I’m bombarded with daily goes a long way in discouraging me from keeping a regularly written blog.  By my thinking, blogging has always been the mundane territory of would-be critics and illegitimate cultural theorists, though I will admit that I know some very talented bloggers.

This then, I hope, will not be a blog, in the sense of what I’ve been up to/what I’ve been thinking about/what I think about ________.

I’m also not one much for prose (my own writing of it, not reading), and because this project, Lie & Indite, involves poetry, which is not prose, the infusion of (broken) prose narrative into our presentation of each image seems like a betrayal of what we’re trying to present.  But then again, this project is not really about poetry, nor is it about poise, the body, or sex.  Certainly all of those things are present here, as they are in as much of any experience, but my hope for this project is that besides releasing a series of beautiful images, Katelan and I along with the photographer can convey a sense of what the body, or what poetry, or what a photo is in a sense of physicality, both as the objects of and vehicles to creation, and as the desired objects of each other, each informing our view of the other.  I would think that the general reader, if (s)he reads poetry at all, goes first to the meaning of the poem, or tries to interrogate a meaning out of it, often disregarding the poem as an object existing separately from his or her own reading.  Likewise (but conversely), the voyeur goes first to the image, the physical object of the body, neglecting that the body in question exists in a meaning created of its own circumstances and desires, wholly separate (well, usually) from the desire of the voyeur. 

(photo by Balthazar)

It only seems reasonable to write a post to kick things off, despite already having written too much about a project that should speak for itself.  Structures change in time, by growth and decay, though the photographs presented here are, without a doubt, the substance of moments.  What I hope you as a viewer walk away from Lie & Indite with is the idea of structure, your idea of it, interrogated.

M.C.L., Jan. 2011