Wandering around the Library: On the Joint Book of Poet Harold Schimmel and Photographer Avigail Schimmel

This essay examines a book that offers a reading experience based on changing relations between different kinds of representation coexisting within the whole. Illustrating this alternative mode of reading, I analyze the characteristics of such an inter-medial publication placing it within a literary tradition established by English photography pioneer Henry Fox Talbot in The Pencil of Nature. The essay will discuss not only the poetics of the poet Harold Schimmel alongside that of his daughter, the photographer Avigail Schimmel, but also the ways in which their joint work gives rise to a broader concept of an ideal library.