POLAROIDS BY NICK MARTINO
Artist Statement
In October of last year I flew home to take care of my mother after she fell off a ladder and shattered her heel bone in thirteen places. While at home, I discovered a cache of Polaroid photographs of my parents from 1989, four years before I was born. I knew the history, but it was the first time I’d glimpsed photographic evidence of the narrative that had both preceded and dominated my life—an aftermath whose pieces I have spent so long trying to glue back together.
To think through them, I wrote an ekphrasis of each Polaroid with a form that I invented for the purpose of this project: twelve lines of equal length so that their squareness might resemble a Polaroid’s picture window.
From there I conducted erasures of the poems. With each poem I present a copy of the erasure first and then the “full” text so that the text “develops” across the page, resembling the process of Polaroid developing in front of your eyes, or the way that an understanding of your family history develops. My methodology for the erasures shifted for each Polaroid: for some I erased so that certain images might boil to the surface first. For some I erased towards the past, towards a sparer understanding.
When I brought these poems to The Los Angeles Review, I’d already been playing around with animating them so that their development could take place in real time. But it was Brent and Lawrence who suggested I translate the videos into GIFs. In this way, the reader would have to sit with the piece (perhaps through multiple cycles of development) in order to glean the full series—much in the same way that I’d sit with the photographs themselves, turning them over in my hands. I am grateful to Brent and Lawrence for their mentorship and guidance and to The Los Angeles Review for helping me realize this new expression of my work.
Nick Martino is a poet and teacher in LA. His work is published or forthcoming from Best New Poets, Narrative Magazine, The Southern Review, and West Branch, among others.