Poem Analysis Of Darkness Starts By Christian Wiman

The poem that I chose to transform into a different medium is “Darkness Starts” by Christian Wiman. The poem focuses on the idea of the evolution of light to dark, taking a positive subject and transforming it to something negative. Each new stanza the poem holds on to the theme of the gradual change and development of people and objects, but restarts with a new subject. Wiman starts off with a house, then trees, then an undefined subject, and finally children. He explores how “darkness starts” inside of all things, and eventually makes its escape. A new subject’s evolution of negative change is introduced and completed in a single sentence. He places periods at the end of each stanza to signify an end to the idea …show more content…
The first line is “A shadow in the shape of a house”. When I read this line, I immediately thought of the subject of the first photo being a house that is very clear and crisp, just a simple print. I wanted to start with the shape of the house, and then make changes to the way that it was perceived. I was unable to get a good angle with real houses, so I ended up taking a photo of a large shed and having it be my “house”. The shadow of the house then “slides out of a house / and loses its shape on the lawn” (2-3). The change that the house goes through is negative, and seems like it is slipping away into the earth. Something darker is escaping from the house; the darkness has a mind of its own. I wanted to make it look like the shadow was a living being in motion, so I darkened the original photo of the house and painted on the developer in a streaky motion to give the illusion of the same house, just a more negative version. The new, negative version of the house became its shadow. To capture the idea that the shadow was sliding out of the house, I dripped the developer on the photo so that the shadow looked like it was slipping away. The last photo I made for this sequence was the same photo of the house except with a photo of grass layered over the top. In this, the house got lost in the grass and its darkness seemed to fade away, just like in the last line of the poem. The …show more content…
It only took a couple of hours to actually take the pictures and develop the film. I had a friend be the subject for a lot of the photos and I was able to find the other subjects that I had planned quite easily. This all went smoothly. However, I began to encounter some issues when I started to take a closer look at my negatives. When you are taking photos with film, you cannot see what your picture looks like until you develop the roll. So the lighting, shutter speed, clarity, or angle of the photo could be completely off but you will have no idea until it’s too late. I also only had one roll of film with twenty-four pictures. Since I wanted to have three photos for each stanza, half of my photos had to be good enough to use. I also wanted to use a layering technique when printing the pictures, so the lighting had to be good enough that the two negatives wouldn’t overshadow each other when layered. I was nervous about only having one shot to get the photos that I wanted for the