Launch of Light Box

Words and vision

The word ‘photography’ combines the ancient Greek for ‘light’ and ‘writing’ – and a new work commissioned by the University of St Andrews for the 2015 UNESCO International Year of Light, uses poetry and photographs not only to capture the art and the beauty of light, but also to focus on the science (and scientists) involved…

Take a poet who has written a lot about light and a photographer who says that his black and white pictures are “all about light,” and the result is an extraordinary project called Light Box – a collection of haikus inspired by the wonders of light, and photographs which tell the same story. Because the poet also has an interest in science (including optoelectronics) and is a Professor at the University of St Andrews, working with a photographer well known for his portraits, it also makes sense for the work to include poetic sketches and portraits of scientists working in the Organic Semiconductor Optoelectronics research group at St Andrews.

Add three poets studying for their MLitt in Creative Writing at the same university, who have written poems in collaboration with photographers and scientists working on various projects connected with light, and you have the formula for an enlightening and entertaining evening at the Royal Society of Edinburgh (RSE).

Light Box is a collaboration between poet Robert Crawford (Professor of Modern Scottish Literature and Bishop Wardlaw Professor of Poetry in the School of English at St Andrews) and Norman McBeath, a photographer whose work focuses on people and places, including 60 portraits in the permanent collections of the National Portrait Galleries in London and Edinburgh.

The evening began with a series of readings by Crawford, quoting from poems referring to light in its various forms. “Let there be braziers,” he began, reading an extract from The Tip of My Tongue, “holophotal lenses, polished golden flags, champagne and candles. Let rays shine through the rose window of Chartres.” Moving on to A Scottish Assembly, his first collection of poetry, published in 1990, he described how he had “borrowed the language” of a scientist friend to write about semiconductors and lasers, calling Scotland “a chip of a nation” which was not small-minded.

Crawford then explained how Light Box was made possible by scientists at the University of St Andrews, including Emeritus Professor John Allen, the leader of the team which developed “the world’s first practical, visible” LED (light-emitting diode). The “crystal lamps” were a breakthrough in science, but Allen first used them to decorate a Christmas tree in 1961. Crawford’s haiku about Allen is as follows:

You have made light work

Nimbly, and so in old age

You are still a source.

Amongst the other people featured in the book are Professor Ifor Samuel FRSE, Director of Research in the School of Physics and head of the Organic Semiconductor Optoelectronics research group, and three of his colleagues: Olena Kulyk, who once studied missile systems and now uses light to target cancer; Ashu Kumar Bansal, who has developed a non-invasive wearable sensor used to develop prosthetics and works ‘to make sure / the work of enlightenment / continues unquenched’; and Hien Nguyen, who has developed a new form of synthesised coumarin to be used in photography. Coumarin was used in the Aton exhibit and represented a ‘world first’, in that it incorporated this newly synthesised form which has never before been used in a photographic process.

To explain why he chose to use haikus, Crawford described it as the poetic form which comes closest to the click of a camera shutter. The history of photography is also important to the genesis of Light Box – in 1840, St Andrews was the first town in the world to be “thoroughly documented” by photography, said Crawford, and this innovative spirit continues today with the work of the physics research group. Professor Allen also keeps inventing and last year registered another new patent, whilst the university is also putting together the world’s first digital collection of photopoetry. “It’s like Diwali,” said Crawford, “a festival of light.” Collaboration was also important in the development of Light Box, just as it’s essential to all innovation.

McBeath then commented that he is also interested in the broader aspects of the project, and the “pure imagination” of what scientists are doing with such an important yet also such a common thing – for example, using light in diagnostics.

To conclude the launch, Crawford and McBeath then invited the three postgraduate poets (on the MLitt Creative Writing course) – Helen Nicholson, Amanda Merritt and Tristram Fane Saunders – to read out their poems, inspired by the research done in St Andrews, illustrated by appropriate photographs, including one of noctolucent clouds and polytunnels used by Nicholson for her work, Light Fantastic. Merritt used a photograph of flowers for her musings on light and the body, whilst Fane Saunders wrote about bees – the “flying biosensors” used to detect unexploded bombs in the Balkans by “smelling” TNT in pollen and recording their find on a special plastic film which is sensitive to the electromagnetic charge on the bees. “This bee is dynamite,” his poem concluded.