Hotel Poem – Charlotte Mann

Using an old camera, obtrusive, clumsy, obvious and curious, I photograph what is in front of me to obtain the undefined result of what is really there.   

Film provides an insight, a spirituality and a permanency that digital technology doesn’t, at least not for me.   

The act of photographing is to shoot, and I am much like a huntress, or a soldier, selecting my subjects (or targets), not to destroy but to record and affirm and reveal.  

I see so much beauty everywhere and in every condition.  I am compelled to share it and my camera is the messenger.  

My photographs of Cleveland poets began once I was moved, over and over again, by the truth, energy, passion, talent, courage and creativity of the many people in this city  who write and perform poetry, only a portion of whom are included on these walls.    I set out to record, through many twists and turns,  the anima of each in individualized photographic portraits.  Here are the results.   A testament of Cleveland.  

The Mexico photographs are from late spring/early summer.  We arrived  during the peak of H1N1 (aka The Swine Flu) hysteria.  As the weeks went by, the sensation of fear seemed to settle into a sense of fatalism and torpor , with an ambient  foreshadowing of some kind of cataclysmic event or revolution.    I suppose the abundance of religious imagery and mysticism that abounds in Mexico contributes to this perception. 

 

 

 

Charlotte Mann, Photographer   

August, 2009