36 Exposures

36 Exposures is a year-long suite of verse and image by Dominic J. Jaeckle and Hoagy Houghton. Over the course of a single year, Houghton would send Jaeckle three photographs a month from his archive; Jaeckle would respond with an accompanying poem or prose-work for each image. At the year's end, the resulting collection would cover twelve months-comprising 36 images and 36 reactions-and express itself as a roll of film in the abstract. A contact sheet spoilt by written interventions; an index of distractions and elaborations; an array of materials that pictures a false or disrupted communication as ideas are exchanged and images developed over the course of a calendar year. From the onset of the project to its end, Jaeckle and Houghton never met in person-this exchange of materials was their only means of communication-and thus, this collaboration is a form of conversation twelve-months wide and three-hundred-and-sixty-five days long. The texts number fragments, at turns essayistic and anecdotal (short verses, prose-poems, and assimilated citations)-the images are largely personal (snapshots, familiar faces, passing objects of interest and attention)-and this aleatory work of journal-ism and paean to the second-hand idea seeks to toy with the coalescence of a photograph and its caption, to play with a poetics of description, and to dramatize differing definitions of the very word, exposure.