The photographer Norman McBeath and poet Robert Crawford have just completed a collaboration called Light Box which was launched at the Royal Society of Edinburgh. A digital version of Light Box can be viewed through this link: https://arts.st-andrews.ac.uk/digitalhumanities/node/199
Light Box celebrates light in all its aspects – solar, sacred, scientific, nourishing, and poetic. The work juxtaposes a series of haiku by Robert Crawford with black and white photographs by Norman McBeath. The relation between poems and pictures is often teasingly oblique: neither simply illustrates the other. Instead, they ‘resonate’ together, each enhancing the other.
Exactly 150 years ago the great Scottish physicist James Clerk Maxwell published his most influential paper on electromagnetism (a paper crucial to Einstein). Maxwell had a scientific instrument called a ‘light box’. Nineteenth-century scientists sometimes wrote of light ‘resonating’. This new Light Box was produced after the poet and the photographer met leading physicists who work in optoelectronics.
The work is presented as a limited edition (10) loose leaf, boxed set in a black buckram, archival quality, solander box with silver gilt title and published by Easel Press.The colophon is signed by poet and artist.
Light Box was specially commissioned by the University of St Andrews as a contribution to the UNESCO International Year of Light. Further details about the International Year of Light can be seen through this link:
http://www.light2015.org/Home.html.
Norman McBeath lives in Edinburgh and has over sixty portraits in the collections of the National Portrait Galleries in London, Edinburgh and Canberra. Robert Crawford is Professor of Modern Scottish Literature at the University of St Andrews. His biography of TS Eliot, recently published by Cape and by Farrar, Straus & Girou, was featured on BBC Radio 4's Book of the Week.
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