BLACK AND WHITE
Photographs and A Poem

Louis Dienes

FOREWORD

"Black and White," originally titled "Occasional Poem," was written in the spring of 1957. The occasion was the "Black and White" show at the Terrain Gallery, in which I had the honor to have photographs of mine. The poem was written at the suggestion of my colleague and Terrain Gallery director, Dorothy Koppelman. It reflects the excitement arising from discussions of the opposites in classes taught by Eli Siegel, founder of Aesthetic Realism, and also by other artists including myself in public events at the gallery.

"Black and White" was printed in the announcement of my one-man show of photographs at the Terrain in 1962. I am proud of this poem because it expresses, along with my enthusiasm for black and white photography, my gratitude to Eli Siegel for teaching me, beginning in the first Aesthetic Realism class I ever attended with him in 1943, that the deepest desire of every person--my deepest desire--is to see things as having beauty and meaning rather than as ugly and meaningless.

The lines arose as I looked through a number of photographs I had selected—the pictures gave rise to the words. The poem was written at one sitting in some hours time, as I looked and wrote, wrote and looked. I am proud that Eli Siegel saw this as a true poem.

I feel that the essence of what I was going after that evening in 1962 was seen by Ellen Reiss, the Class Chairman of Aesthetic Realism, as she discussed the poem in a class of Nov. 24, 1998. Miss Reiss said of the first line: "‘The day black and white got a break’—this is very firm but there's nuance, so the line holds up." And she said further: "Every poem is contracted and expansive. There's contraction and expansion in these lines. Black and white can make anything more abstract, take on something more 
elemental."

Since I had the honor to hear Ellen Reiss read and comment on "Black and White," I've been stirred and impelled to put it into a new form. I offer this work of photography and poetry with this hope: that instances of the visual, gotten down in black and white with camera, film, and print, can be at one with the same visual things, gotten down in words—in sentences, put into lines of free verse. And further, that the oneness of detail and wide suggestion, firmness and nuance, which is in each art can be continued in a joining of the two on a page.