Natalie Czech

A poem by Repetition by Gertrude Stein, 2013

Natalie Czech uses the medium of photography to investigate the multi-faceted interaction of pictures and texts, revealing new levels of meaning in her search for inherent poetic potential. The raw material of her poetic concept photographs takes the form of found material from old papers, magazines and illustrated volumes; she reveals the poems hidden within the flow of the text. Czech works with illustrated pages from magazines and books, bringing to the fore individual letters or words within passages of text by underlining them or highlighting them in color and thereby tracing poems whose existence within the text had previously been concealed. These interventions provide Czech with a model for her photographs. When put together, the marked sections strategically scattered throughout the original text form a text in their own right, which can then be read alongside the already existing textual material, interacting with it and permitting a number of different readings. Czech uses visual art as a tool to reveal the hidden possibilities inherent in language and to set words in motion, releasing them from the established directional conventions of text reading. Instead of running always in the same direction, the interrelated meanings in the text develop a life of their own.