An Interview with Natasha Trethewey

Natasha Trethewey

JILL PETTY:

Photography figures a lot in your work—often you’re in the herds of black people while they’re being photographed, or speaking to whites who are taking those pictures. What does that allow you to explore? What are you saying about visibility or spectatorship?

NATASHA TRETHEWEY:

I actually think about both, but I’m especially interested in absence. Every photograph represents a moment that is no longer, passed, as well as ways of being that have disappeared. I’ve always been a little obsessed with the way photographs hold and create an object out of that moment. And I’ve often thought if you look at a photograph, if you really study the gestures and expressions that the people have in the photograph, you could see the rest of their lives, everything that’s to come. I think my interest in photographs started after my mother died. I started looking at old photographs of her, trying to see if it was all there in the photographs, what was going to happen to her and to us and our lives. Is it here, or do I, as the poet, put it there? That’s part of my fixation with photographs. Recently, I’ve been reading On Photography, Susan Sontag’s book, and she says the very act of taking a photograph is somewhat cruel and mean. The first part of my poem, “Three Photographs,” is from the point of view of the photographer, and the next part of the poem is from the point of view of one of the subjects in the photograph. She has a voice that’s not usually heard—she talks about the reality that is imposed on her, as a subject in a photo. The persona in the poem tries to turn that around with language while looking back at the photographer at the same time. The third section of that poem is more or less in my voice. I’m in a gallery, seeing these photographs, feeling the gaze of the photographer, which I share as I view these images on the wall. But I am overwhelmed by their—the subject, the black people’s—gaze that comes out of those photographs through time to look at me. And I feel compelled and responsible to speak about the connection that I have to them.

PETTY:

That’s a powerful moment when you make that connection between the subjects and yourself. But something you said about Susan Sontag made me think about the nature of poetry, too. You frame your poems like photos, with dates, certain language, metaphor. If photography is cruel, is poetry cruel also? Your poems read like sepia snapshots to me, too. They are very much, as you said, a way into somebody’s life.

TRETHEWEY:

At the same time Sontag mentions photography as a cruel practice, she makes the distinction between the photographer as artist and the poet. Poets turn themselves inside out, search for the substance of their own lives and their own pain, but photographers voluntarily go out seeking other people’s pain. Now, that’s how she puts it, and I guess in many ways I would agree. But are my poems cruel? I think there’s a little bit of cruelty and introspection, because I certainly dig down. Say we were to talk about the series of poems about my grandmother’s work and her life. I chose her work to be the thing that I was going to narrate her life through; I was going out and looking for her particular pains or her particular sufferings and using the stories she’s told me to create this framework. At the same time, she became a character for me. I’m not separate from that character, and I don’t think I would have been able to write those poems if each feeling expressed and what her character goes through in every poem wasn’t something that was close to home, something I knew very well. So it’s still my pain, but I have...