Semiotica 2020; 236–237: 85–102

Sten Langmann* and Paul Gardner

The intersemiotic affordances of
photography and poetry
https://doi.org/10.1515/sem-2018-0050

Abstract: This article explores the intersemiotic affordances of photography and

poetry and the expansion of meaning that surpasses the meanings embedded in
and elicited from both. We specifically investigate the processes and mechanisms
of this semantic expansion by systematically reconstructing the compositional
process of poems written from three photographs and forensically investigate how
the poems emerged out of each visual frame. We discovered that intersemiosis
between photography and poetry demonstrates a strong interpretative component.
Intra-semiotic connections between elements within the photograph are inter-
preted by the viewer or writer and are translated by means of inter-semiotic triggers
into intra-semiotic connections within the emerging poem during the process of
composition. The resulting inter-semiotic connections between the photograph
and the poem create and multiply meaning for both mediums together and inde-
pendently. In other words, in the process of composition, the poem reads the
meanings of components of the photograph framed by the photographer and
super-frames them; creating a new frame of meanings that draw upon, and extend,
meanings in the original frame of the photograph. At the same time, the poem
enters a stage of self-change and self-reflection, inhabiting the life of the
photograph.

Keywords: intersemiosis, photography, poetry, semantic expansion, ekphrastic

poetry

1 Introduction
This article explores a prism of intersemiosis between photography and ekphrastic
poetry by overlapping both semiotic systems to identify the unfolding and con-
struction of meaning of a series of photographs and accompanying ekphrastic

*Corresponding author: Sten Langmann, Edith Cowan University, Joondalup, Australia,

E-mail: s.langmann@ecu.edu.au
Paul Gardner, Curtin University, Perth, Australia, E-mail: paul.gardner@curtin.edu.au
86 S. Langmann and P. Gardner

poetry. This is a process of synthesis, culminating in a semantic expansion, in

which the visual and the linguistic modes co-exist symbiotically. Our main prop-
osition is that the intersemiosis of photography and ekphrastic poetry upon one
another creates a fusion and an expansion of meaning that surpasses the meanings
embedded/elicited in/from both and simultaneously acts as a conduit for self-
reflection and self-change to both the photographs and the poems individually. In
other words, we believe that the insights into the meanings of photographs and
poetry beyond their individual parts allow language and the visual medium to
interact to create and multiply meanings from and to both. However, the processes
and outcomes of semantic expansion through the intersemiosis of photography
and poetry have yet to be fully articulated. Reading the photographic image and
using it as a conduit to compose an ekphrastic poem involves a polysemic process
and the interpretation of intra-semiotic connections of elements during the pro-
cess. Those intra-semiotic connections between elements within the photograph
are interpreted by the viewer/writer and are translated by means of inter-semiotic
triggers into intra-semiotic connections within the emerging poem during the
process of composition. O’Halloran (2008) notes that the integration of these two
modes of semiosis necessitates a meta-approach capable of capturing how lan-
guage and the visual image interact to create meaning. Our main contribution is to
shed light on this meta-approach of the intersemiotic relationship between
photography and ekphrastic poetry by systematically reconstructing the compo-
sitional process of the poem from the photograph and in doing so, forensically
investigate how the poem emerged out of the visual frame. We will discuss the
expansion in meaning for both.
We begin by first reviewing the essential scholarly elements of intersemiosis,
followed by a review of current intersemiotic applications and developments be-
tween photography and poetry. We then present our intersemiosis of photography
and poetry in three vignettes with detailed description of the reconstruction pro-
cess of the intersemiosis between photography and poetry and explore the affor-
dances of this relationship. In Section 8, we consider the implications of this
process to the broader theories of intersemiosis and social semiotic signification,
which may be both enhanced and disrupted when signs are presented in inno-
vative ways, such as in poetry or by means of dyadic imagery.

2 Intersemiosis
Intersemiosis is a central element in the larger field of multimodal research
(O’Halloran 2011). Language by itself has become insufficient to access to mean-
ings of contemporary messages arising from multiple semiotic resources (Kress
 The intersemiotic affordances of photography and poetry 87

and Mavers 2004; Kress and van Leeuwen 2001). Semiotic resources here describe
the different modes (for example, languages, images, music) that can be integrated
across sensory modalities or sensory communication channels (for example, vi-
sual and auditory; O’Halloran 2011). The resulting inter-modal or inter-semiotic
relations arising from this interaction of semiotic choices known as intersemiosis
(Jewitt 2009) produces “remarkable dynamic relationships” (New London Group
2000: 28).
For the purposes of this article, we define intersemiosis as the expansion of
two semiotic resources and their metaphorical shifts of meaning, with meaning
circulating between both sign systems (Aktulum 2017; O’Halloran 2008; Vitral
et al. 2016). Intersemiosis is generally attributed to Jakobson (1959), who in his
essay On Linguistic Aspects of Translation first talks about intersemiotic translation
as the interpretation of linguistic sings by means of non-linguistic signs. This
intersemiotic process has since expanded to literature, cinema, photography,
poetry, dance, music, theatre, sculpture and paintings (Vitral et al. 2016).

3 Intersemiosis between photography and

ekphrastic poetry
Numerous scholars have utilised photography and ekphrastic poetry with its
intersemiotic affordances in different directions. Furman and colleagues (2008)
used photography and poetry as art-based qualitative research tools to gain in-
sights into the “lived experiences” of patients in a Chinese psychiatric hospital.
The poems were written subsequently, based on their interpretation of the pho-
tographs. The poems served as “textual interpretations of visual interpretation”
(Furman et al. 2008: 35). Together, they afforded an evocative expression into the
lives of psychiatric patients in China, designed to stimulate the viewer to combine
different artistic methods to produce qualitative data and to understand the hu-
man condition (Furman et al. 2008). Friesen (2012) and Wiseman et al. (2016)
explored photography and poetry in the context of education to give students an
opportunity for conveying their work in both visual and written senses. Friesen
(2012) challenged students to take photographs and write a short poem as a
description to their image. The educational implications of this combination let
students to contribute to class discussions and speaking out utilising various
semiotic means. Wiseman et al. (2016) similarly combined photography and poetry
to expand the students’ methods of communication and how both help to develop
the students’ ideas and enhance their story. This class activity promoted teamwork
between the students, creating both a shift in their agency in a classroom
88 S. Langmann and P. Gardner

environment and removing labels such as “struggling” and “advanced” by uti-

lising the affordances of both semiotic modes. Tay (2016) utilised street photog-
raphy and poems as a means of critical reflection on the possibilities of street
photography. The intersemiosis of photography and poetic desire stipulated Tay
(2016: 397) to “render another way of seeing” within busy urban spaces in Hong
Kong.
Despite the semiotic combination of photography and poetry in different
research settings, insights into the processes and mechanisms of the semantic
expansion and affordances of the intersemiosis between photography and poetry
have yet to be fully articulated. Specifically, Royce (2007 cited in Liu and O’Hal-
loran 2009: 367) argues that there “remains a lack of research on the nature of
intersemiotic semantic relations to explain ‘what features make multimodal text
visually – verbally coherent’.” Liu and O’Halloran (2009) use the term inter-
semiotic texture to describe the coherence of two semantic units into one. This
intersemiotic texture and its manifestation process are particularly interesting to
explore between photography and ekphrastic poetry, as we argue that a semiotic
juxtaposition and complexity characterises this relationship and therefore re-
quires a reading from whole to parts and back again.
In photography, semiotic meanings are read primarily from the whole to its
parts through the process of semiotic analysis and to a lesser extent, iconographic/
iconologic analysis. Semiotic analysis elicits meanings and signs from photo-
graphs by analysing the “detailed accounts of the exact ways the meanings of an
image are produced through that image” (Rose 2012: 106), unfolding cultural
knowledge and significations and explain those discoveries to the reader for him or
her to understand the photograph (Penn 2000). In other words, the photograph
involves a semiotic perception of the whole followed by an attention to the parts as
they function within the whole (O’Halloran 2008; Stepchenkova and Zhan 2013).
The converse is true of an ekphrastic poem, in which meaning evolves from a
reading of the significance of its parts in relation to the whole. This is partly due to
an ekphrastic poem being one written in relation to or of an art object or a
photograph (Barry 2002). Ellis (2012) traces the development of ekphrastic poetry
from the eighth century BC, when Homer describes Achilles shield in the epic poem
Iliad. Over time, the stimulus for ekphrastic poetry became any human-made
object, but its modern usage has tended to be mainly in relation to painting (Brown
1992). Hollander (1995) differentiates between what he calls notional ekphrasis, or
the description of something that does not actually exist, as is the case with
Achilles shield, and actual ekphrasis, or the poetic depiction of actual objects,
pictures. Furthermore, Barry (2002) differentiates closed, open, and ajar epk-
phrasis. In closed ekphrasis, the poem strictly speaks about what is seen in the art
object (Barry 2002). The poem in open ekphrasis is more implicit and the object is
 The intersemiotic affordances of photography and poetry 89

unframed in that it presents a scene or scenario as a whole (Barry 2002). Ajar

ekphrasis is neither open nor closed, transcribing “closed” content in an art object
or photograph while also describing “open” meanings to encourage the reader to
imagine elements not depicted in the art works (Barry 2002). Ekphrasis is more
than description; it speaks to and for a work of art and, therefore, provokes a
contest between the image and its words, igniting connotation to also speak
outside the borders of the poet’s imagination and although not being “real,” in a
parallel universe of art (Barry 2002; Heffernan 1993 cited in Ellis 2012).
In this study, we explore this intersemiotic relationship from the whole to its
parts and back again between of a series of photographs and accompanying
ekphrastic poetry and examine what happens when a poem is juxtaposed with a
static visual image. O’Halloran (2008) notes that the integration of these two
modes of semiosis necessitates a meta-approach capable of capturing how lan-
guage and the visual image interact to create meaning. The purpose of Section 4 of
the paper is to do just that; to systematically reconstruct the compositional process
of the poem and in so doing, simultaneously forensically investigate how the poem
emerged out of the visual frame. Our main proposition is that the intersemiosis of
photography and ekphrastic poetry upon one another creates a fusion and an
expansion of meaning that surpasses the meanings embedded/elicited in/from
both and simultaneously acts as a conduit for self-reflection and self-change to
both the photographs and the poems individually.

4 Background to our study

The photographs we present in this section were taken by Sten as part of a larger
qualitative study on poverty reduction and capacity building in the city of Chennai
located in Tamil Nadu, India. A part of Sten’s research aimed to construct sub-
stantive theory about knowledge sharing to reduce poverty and generate various
capabilities for the poor. The research used photography as a visual and contextual
means of exploring, identifying and understanding the relationships between
poverty and current theories of poverty and development issues. Photographs were
used because they were able to capture details about particular moments in the
lives of people that revealed information either about social processes (Basil 2011),
or drew attention to human perception and experience and thereby provoked an
interpretation of these conditions (Willig 1998). Such visual data revealed rich
detail about social processes that were not able to be collected by other means. The
images were taken throughout Sten’s data collection process to understand the
daily struggles of the poor while allowing the poor their own agency through the
photographs. The collection of three photographs as vignettes in this paper formed
90 S. Langmann and P. Gardner

part of a larger pool of photographs. One of the images in this paper became part of
21 images used as a photo-narrative, available in Langmann (2014: 180–219). The
other two images presented here are so far unpublished. Sten sent a selection of six
photographs to Paul who then selected three that immediately resonated with him.
Once a photograph had been chosen, Paul wrote quickly, completing each
poem within 5–15 min, by drawing on the semiotic affordances of the image. In his
work, Paul uses poetry to challenge social inequality and neo-conservative dis-
courses. He uses language concisely to create a “snapshot” of feeling or an idea.
The discipline of creating short poems was perfected using Twitter, which restricts
texts to 140 characters. He is currently working on collection poetry, originally
written as Twitter poems, called “Missive to the Ether.”
In writing a poem as a response to the photograph, a second layer of meanings
“hover” as metaphor next to each photograph. This second semiotic system (the
poetic/linguistic mode) incites recursive glances back to the visual image, causing
re-interpretations of the primary semiotic. In other words, although the photo-
graphs and the poems present works and interpretations on their own, the com-
bination allows for a richer reading of both. At this point, there is perhaps the
inception of an imagined story. Inherent to this idea is the interpretation of the
visual image as an incomplete narrative (Kinloch 2014). However, this view ne-
gates the notion of the image having unity of purpose; a self-contained text, just as
a poem is complete in itself. In the first instance, this “metaphorical shift” occurs
through the writer’s interpretation of affordances offered by the visual image as (s)
he works within a new system of meaning making. In Section 5, we present three
vignettes, each comprised a photograph, its corresponding poem and an analysis
of the semiotic linkage between the photograph and the poem as it evolved in
composition.

5 Vignette 1: Boy in the street

The photograph in Figure 1, titled “Boy in the Street,” depicts a young boy
squatting on the sidewalk. He appears to be holding two puppies. The boy is
probably from a poor background the sidewalk is often the “playground” of poor
children in Chennai. Sten took this image because, for him, this picture captures
the social reality for many children in Chennai, Tamil Nadu. The low income of
parents, especially in the rural areas, compels many of these children to start
working early and abandon their education. The top right of the image depicts
another boy, who is also holding a puppy. The background is characterised by
traffic passing (left) and gathered possessions (top right), often left outside by
poorer families due to lack of space.
 The intersemiotic affordances of photography and poetry 91

Figure 1: Boy in the street.

Paul’s interpretation of the photograph is depicted in the following poem:

A fractured gutter;

I squat with debris,

Fragments, lost in the

Softness of a friend

Against my skin:

We are all we have.

92 S. Langmann and P. Gardner

Figure 2: Boy in the street (analysis).

As Paul viewed the photograph, three strands of thought began to weave their way
into his cognitive lexicon, they were: isolation, impoverishment and solace. The
boy appeared alone amidst the waste of human consumption but his connection
with the dog(s) was a source of solace (in the mind of the writer). A fuller analysis of
the poem’s composition follows.
Figure 2 offers an intersemiotic analysis of the photograph and poem.
Although the boy is the protagonist, or “Actor” (Kress and Van Leeuwen 2001), the
“inciting moment” of the poem is the gutter. The irregularity of this vector implies a
state of brokenness, which suggests semantic duality. The boy is almost sat in the
gutter, which evoked for Paul the word, “guttersnipe”: meaning an outcast of
orphaned street child. In the 19th Century the word “gutter” was a metaphor for
low socio-economic status and, at first glance, the boy appears alone (although
there is another boy in the top right of the picture), which reinforced his social
isolation.
The word “fracture” in the first line serves two purposes: at one level, in
juxtaposition to the word “gutter,” it functions as mimetic description (Kinloch
2014), but at a second level it is a metaphor for the boy’s dislocation from family
and community; the mainstream of human connections. The second line fuses
outsider gaze with first person focalization, taking the writer into the frame. From
the first person perspective, the second line might considered descriptive. How-
ever, hovering above the word “debris,” as a synonym for the rubbish strewn
 The intersemiotic affordances of photography and poetry 93

gutter, is the continuation “fracture,” as a second tier metaphor. In this semantic

field the word debris refers to discarded things which are dislocated from their
purpose. These too are “fractured” objects. This semantic “seeps” into the word
“fragments,” which is pivotal. It represents the child’s position as a fragment of
humanity but also signals, “lost,” as both a continuation of things not being in
their rightful place, and the child absorbed in the sensual luxuriance of the dog’s
fur. The enjambment following the word “lost” and ending in “skin” combines
both tactile and affective proximity – “the softness of a friend,” culminating in the
concluding line in which the relationship of the dog and the boy is consolidated.
The solace and pathos of the final line, ignites a partial reversal from the
brokenness of the fractured gutter to the wholeness of the boy dog relationship.
(N.B. the boy is actually holding two dogs but during the compositional process, I
saw only one dog).
Paul’s semiotic overlaying of the poem onto the photograph enhanced Sten’s
understanding of the photograph by adding fresh layers of depth to it. Sten’s
original theme was the social inequality experienced by children in Chennai, as a
result of being in a low income households. However, by overlaying themes of
“fracture,” “the guttersnipe,” and “loss,” with emphasis to different parts of the
photograph, Paul drew Sten’s attention to and enhanced his understanding of the
depth of social inequality in the photograph and what this really means. Although
in this example, the theme of the photograph remained unchanged, the semiotic
overlay of the poem onto the photo created additional semiotic depth and richness,
which without this overlay, would have been diminished.

6 Vignette 2: The music of shadows

The photograph in Figure 3, titled “The Music of Shadows,” depicts a doctor
providing treatment to a patient in rural Tamil Nadu. Sten’s involvement with the
doctor, who provided free treatment to patients, shed light the different health
problems in the rural areas, caused by working in harsh farming conditions.
Women especially often carry multiple responsibilities, such as securing the
household income; taking care of the home and caring for the children. Sten
observed that more women than men sought treatment at the health centres and
the doctor treating the female patient is a symbol of the consequence of the impact
on women’s health of their harsh lives. In rural areas especially, healthcare access
remains a problem. Despite the doctor treating around 20–30 patients in one day,
Sten observed each person was given individual care and attention, which is
reflected in the doctor’s intense, yet caring face in the photograph.
94 S. Langmann and P. Gardner

Figure 3: The music of shadows.

Paul’s poem to the photograph is as follows:

He holds an ear to her beating heart,

Pressed at distance; a connection

From light to her place in the shadow,

With knowledge of rhythms,

Reading the fading light.

The two most influential ‘triggers’ for Paul were the proximal relationship and
differential status in the doctor – patient dyad, and the dominance of a black void
in the middle and background of the photograph. The mise-en-scene implied for
Paul pathos, compassion and irony. The doctor’s compassion and concern is
evident in his expression, which is given significance by the darkness into which
the woman appears to fade, suggesting the weakness of her heart. Irony occurs
because of an assumption she is not aware of the imminence of her death, but Paul,
as the viewer, reads what he believes the doctor to be reading in the irregular
beating of her heart.
Although the poem begins with the pronoun, “he,” it was the darkness of the
scene that caught Paul’s attention and theme of the poem, but reference to light
and shadow remained in cognitive parenthesis until line four. This contrast
“hovers” over the whole poem through dichotomies of man – woman; doctor –
patient; life – death. The stethoscope functions as both index and vector, fusing
visual and linguistic modes into symbiotic text. It denotes his status but the
 The intersemiotic affordances of photography and poetry 95

Figure 4: The music of shadows (analysis).

pronoun positions him as a man, implicating an egalitarian relationship in which

his empathic concentration is not as the dyadic other but as an equal soul. Buber
(2004) calls this the I – thou relationship as opposed to the I – it relationship. In the
latter, the self is an object to the other, whereas the former makes empathy
possible. Line three implies both social distinction and physical separation but the
vector of the stethoscope represents a “man” reaching out to touch her heart – “a
connection from light.” Her passive resignation with downcast eyes and head tilted
forward might be interpreted as cultural deference, but the contrasting light and
shade overrode this reading. “Her place in shadow” is both mimetic and metaphor,
foreshadowing the concluding line in which, a “knowledge of rhythms” enables
the doctor to read her “… fading light” (see Figure 4).
As stated above, Sten’s original theme for the photograph was the connection
between gender inequality and women’s access to health care, but, as explained,
Paul’s focus was the light-shadow relationship, which is contrary to Sten’s original
theme. Gender inequality is re-framed as an equality of souls. Although this cap-
tures Stens’ perception of the doctor’s empathy for his patient, the poem adds
tension by implying the doctor’s knowledge of the fragility of the woman’s life.
Once again, the photograph remains complete as an entity in itself, but with the
overlay of the poem the semantic texture becomes deeper and richer, leading to a
fuller appreciation of the reality of social inequality for many women in India.

7 Vignette 3: Woman with pot

The photograph in Figure 5, titled “Woman with Pot,” depicts an elderly woman
sitting on the floor in a train. The photograph was taken by Sten during a busy
commuting period in Chennai when poorer people are often observed sitting on
the floor of trains, resting from their often laborious days. Sten was drawn to the
96 S. Langmann and P. Gardner

Figure 5: Woman with pot.

tiredness shown in the woman’s face, as being indicative of her harsh working
conditions.
Paul’s poem to Sten’s image reads as follows:

She sits among the footsteps,

Branded soles where bare feet date not.

She only sees the heels of strangers,

The passing of lives untouched;

The caste of days, a brand from birth

Tethering her to the Earth, the lowliest

Of eyes, the disinclined tilt of head,

The sallow fabric and hollow cheek;

And barely half full, her pot, her single

Possession, for collecting the world.

Paul’s thematic concern that framed the composition of the poem was the woman’s
socio-political context. Although she dominates the photograph, all the attendant
physical attributes of the photograph accentuate her marginal status: she is sitting
on the ground at the edge; at the feet of young men who are turned away from her;
 The intersemiotic affordances of photography and poetry 97

Figure 6: Woman with pot (analysis).

even the camera is angled downwards. The poem was both about the woman as the
subject of the photograph but was more an attempt at political comment; a critique
of social class of which she was the subjugated representative.
The intersemiotic analysis shown in Figure 6 makes the woman central to the
composition. Positioning her, “among the footsteps,” is both descriptive of her the
focal point within the mise-en-scene and is indicative of her social status. Paul’s
gaze was drawn to the half full/half empty pot but it was “mentally banked” to re-
emerge in the penultimate line. The woman is depicted as the multiple “other”:
woman – man; age – youth; poverty – affluence. The line, “Branded soles tread
where bare feet dare not” is emblematic of this latter dichotomy. Her closed eyes
signify that the lives of these affluent young men do not touch her in any way.
It is possible to trace a lexico-semantic thread, beginning with “footsteps” in the
first line to the enjambment, “single possession,” as follows: footsteps – branded
soles – bare feet – heels – untouched – caste – brand – tethering – Earth – lowliest –
disinclined tilt – sallow fabric – hollow cheek – barely half full – single possession.
The words in normal print are mimetic descriptors of the photograph, but the
italicised words form a lexical string depicting the woman’s social position that
was generated within the compositional process.
In this respect, the poem exemplifies an ekphrasis that is “ajar” (Barry 2002).
The non-mimetic aspect of the process of ekphrasis here might be explained by
applying Rosenblatt’s (1976) Reader Response Theory, which posits that a text is
always more than the writer intended, because in the creative act of reading the
reader brings to the text their own interpretive lenses, informed by unique expe-
riential knowledge. Gardner (2014) applies a similar notion to the process of
written composition by suggesting that writers draw on three narratives when
writing: their personal narrative (life-stories that are unique to the individual);
inherited narratives (stories from family and the community in which the writer is
98 S. Langmann and P. Gardner

situated) and secondary narratives (stories from other sources, including fiction
and film etc. that resonate with the writer).
Therefore, a response to the photograph is not just an interpretation of what is
seen in isolation of everything else. The photograph is read through the interpre-
tative lenses of the viewer/writer. The writer brings to the image their own personal
and socio-cultural narrative(s) which position them phenomenologically in relation
to the subject being viewed. At this point it is pertinent to say something about Paul’s
personal narrative positioning in order to elucidate the point that is made.
The following are Paul’s experiences:

I come from a family in which my mum was a factory worker most of her life and my dad a
building worker. I grew up on a social housing estate that lacked amenities. I went to a
secondary school deemed to be the worst in the town. Although I cannot equate myself with
the woman in the photograph I understand, from personal experience, the impact of social
class prejudice and structural inequality on the individual, emotionally and psychologically.
Therefore, reading the photograph involved a symbiotic relationship of the marginalised,
which influenced the emergent poem. Hence, the ekphrasis was not an unfolding of the
hidden narrative of the photograph but the outcome of a subconscious dialogic between the
phenomenological standpoint of the viewer/writer and the subject of the photograph. In the
course of writing, meanings were woven from the photograph to the poem as well as through
the poem, as explained above in the discussion of the lexico-semantic “string.” One final
point needs to be made about the compositional process and it is to do with the writer’s socio-
cultural and political knowledge. The photograph is inherently political and the brief dis-
cussion above alludes to this. The woman lacks power, whereas the young men, who can
afford Nike trainers, have some degree of economic choice, which she appears not to possess.
However, from my standpoint in relation to her, there was another narrative silently working
in the background that coincided with the period in which the poem was written. It was the
tragedy of Grenfell Tower, the high rise apartment block in the London Borough of Ken-
sington and Chelsea, judged to be the richest area in England. Except, the people of Grenfell
Tower were not rich; they were amongst the poorest people not only in the borough but in the
whole country. Many of them were migrants, like the young man who had fled the atrocities of
Aleppo, only to be burned to death in the inferno that engulfed the tower. It was a tragedy that
need not have happened if the Borough had used its large economic surplus to install
sprinklers in the building and had not installed cheap external panels containing poly-
ethylene, an inflammable material with the combustibility equivalent to 5 L of petrol per kilo
of material. The now empty, charred carcass of the tower is a macabre symbol of how the
poorest people are treated, how their lives count for little in neo-liberal England. Although, I
no longer live in England, it is the home of my birth and the injustice of Grenfell Tower pained
me because, sociologically, these were my people and I not only understood the tragedy to be
the consequence of classism, that is every bit as pernicious as racism and sexism, but felt the
tragedy also, deep in my being. So, the historical context in which a poem is written fuses with
other narratives the writer brings to the composition.

The two final lines are also more than mimetic description. Her pot is barely half-
full and although unlikely to be truly her own possession, the phrase, “her single
 The intersemiotic affordances of photography and poetry 99

possession” functions as a litotic symbol of her impoverishment. At about the same

time as the Grenfell Tower tragedy, the charity, Oxfam (2017), published the fact
that the eight richest people in the world own the same wealth as the world’s
poorest 3.6 billion. Although, it is not overt stated, this obscene equation hovers
like a spectre within the composition of the poem. The final phrase, “for collecting
the world” is ambivalent. On the one hand it is indicative of her role – to collect
what the world (fellow human beings) discards; on the other it is affirmation of the
potentiality of a single human being, stripped of material possessions, to absorb
the multifaceted richness of the world.
In this instance, the intersemiotic connection between the photograph and the
poem neither deepened, nor extended, Sten’s primary semiotic meanings. They
did, however, completely replace them. The dichotomy Paul constructed between
the brand of the man’s shoe and the contrast with the woman’s bare feet, combined
with the use of the word “brand” to accentuate both the “branded” shoes and the
woman’s “brand from birth” (i.e., her caste), fundamentally altered the meaning
for Sten, of his own photograph. It now represented the stark inequality through
the use of “branding” for Sten, a much more accurate depiction of social realities in
Chennai, which Sten intended to reveal with this image.

8 Discussion
In the course of undertaking the reconstruction of the poem out of the photograph,
our analyses of our engagement with otherness demonstrates the strong inter-
pretive regard in intersemiosis and that the inter-semiotic connections between the
photograph and the poem create and multiply meaning for both together and
independently. The co-presence of the photographs and ekphrastic poems do not
merely replicate or echo what each mode already conveys (Kress and Mavers
2004), however, as Liu and O’Halloran (2009) suggest, an intersemiotic texture
between the two, creating a cohesion between the two beyond mere linkage.
Sten’s photographs spatialized moments in time, which in combination with
its descriptions, became photographic epithanies rather than frozen narratives.
Paul’s poems emerged out of a binary dialect of image and word. Ellis (2012) claims
that ekphrasis is a continuing of the narrative outside the frame of the photograph;
a new work of art that breaks the silence of the photograph in order to articulate an
“emergent truth” that was latent in the image.
In the process of composition, the ekphrastic poem reads the meanings of
components framed by the photographer and super-frames them; that is, creates a
new frame of meanings that draws upon, but extends, meanings in the original
frame of the photograph. Viewing Sten’s photographs incited an empathic
100 S. Langmann and P. Gardner

connection with the protagonists depicted in the images. Momentarily, as the poet,
Paul entered the frame, inhabiting the life of the subject. In this empathetic
moment in the “shoes of the other” emerged the language that breathed dynamism
into the stasis of the photograph. In the poems, these moments elicited the lines:
“we are all we have” in the first photograph; “with knowledge of rhythms” and
“reading the fading light” in the second and most of the text of the third.
The same compositional process of the poem then places the photograph in a
state of self-reflection to its meaning. Photography can often imply a knowledge
and acceptance of the world as the camera spatializes it (Sontag 1977) or as the
photographer interpreted it; however, its relation to the poem challenges that
interpretation. Paul’s poem did not challenge the emphases in Sten’s photographs,
however, placed them direct connection with his own. The resulting intersemiosis
expanded the meaning of the photograph beyond Sten’s original intentions and at
the same time anchored the poem to his posited social interests and positioning of
the photograph.

9 Conclusion
In this article, we explored of intersemiotic affordances between photography,
poetry, and specifically the compositional process of the poem from the visual
frame. We specifically provided vignettes to investigate the process of inter-
semiosis between photography and poetry, and how the inter-semiotic connec-
tions and coherence between both mediums developed. In this process, we
discovered that the translation of intra-semiotic connections in the photograph
translated by intersemiosis trigger inter-semiotic connections between the
photograph and the emerging poem, which expand both mediums beyond mere
linkage. We hope that our insights expanded theoretical understanding of the
intersemiotic process and how photographs and poetry are integrated into one
semantic unit.

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