The Photographer’s Last Picture

Sean Howard has written twenty poems inspired by photographs he discovered in a tattered copy of Collier’s Photographic History of the European War (1916), although ‘inspired’ is hardly an adequate word for it. For Howard, each photograph introduces a cascade of associations and ideas about history and memory, about the events and implications of the First World War, and about our ongoing relationship with global conflict. The resulting poems have the economy and energy of a stark, high-contrast print, yet what is perhaps most striking about the book is the way Howard’s prose passages chronicle the development of each photograph into a poem, like images slowly taking form in the chemistry of a darkroom tray. Following a method that is “precariously dependent on attentiveness, memory and chance encounters, personal and cultural associations followed as broadly, deeply, and unsystematically as possible,” The Photographer’s Last Picture assembles observation, description, quotation and amplification into an episodic text capable of transmitting a range of uncertain truths unavailable to conventional History.