“Found poems take existing texts and refashion them, reorder them, and present them as poems … A pure found poem consists exclusively of outside texts: the words of the poem remain as they were found, with few additions or omissions. Decisions of form, such as where to break a line, are left to the poet,” according to Poetry.org.

That is what I do as a photographer. I find existing things and present them, by way of a camera, as my art. Walker Evans considered the artist as an image collector and that “He collects things with his eye.”

As a photographic artist, I collect visual subjects. I make the decisions of form, such as which camera to render the scene, how to frame the image (what to leave out, what to leave in), film versus digital, color versus black and white and so on. Unlike in poetry, such decisions of form are not “left” to me, they are demanded.

The writer Annie Dillard believed turning a text into a found poem doubles that poem’s context. “The original meaning remains intact, but now it swings between two poles,” she wrote. To expound on that idea in terms of y photography, the original subject remains intact (in a certain way) but its meaning is defined by me.

That is Bliss.