60 HAIKU – Otar Karalashvili

The image itself is speech. The image is the word beyond formulated language.
Ezra Pound
Do not follow in the footsteps of the Ancients; seek what they sought.
Matsuo Basho

“I consider this book not as a photobook but a book of poetry. The pictures of street announcements were taken in Tbilisi, Georgia, in 2009-2012. I did not know at the time why I was taking them, or what I was going to do with them. I think I guessed from the beginning that I was touching on something extremely delicate, and that I should be careful not to damage it. While photographing, out of a feeling not quite comprehensible to myself, but – as I now understand – very distinct, I tried to bring myself in as little as possible, taking simple frame-filling shots and avoiding any intrusion on my side as far as I could. At some moment I knew that I had finished photographing, but I had no idea what to do with the photos. I had a strange sensation that anything I could undertake, – even the simple act of printing and exhibiting – would be a misinterpretation, an unrightful interference that would completely destroy what I wanted to say. It took me five years before I ventured to start making this book. Only while working on it did I, almost accidentally, stumble upon what I think is the correct understanding of
the images it contains. I needed a title for the book; I named it 60 Haiku as a metaphor for the strange effect the announcements had on me. But after I had done so I realized this book literally was a collection of haiku in a very classic sense. I started reading all I could find about haiku, and the more I read the more astonished I was at how thoroughly the meticulously described principles of this form of poetry were realized in a completely different medium. What I had assumed to be photography, simply because I had made it with a photo camera, turned out to be literature. Strangely, the text of the announcements is not the text of the haiku, but part of the image. The text of the haiku is the images – it is the word beyond language.”

Otar Karalashvili