Natalie Czech

Photographic Education in Düsseldorf and Printed Matter Already in Circulation

From 2000 to 2005, Czech studied photography with Thomas Ruff at the Kunstakademie Düsseldorf.^*20 Düsseldorf photographers, including Ruff, had shown how photographic meaning changes through reproduction, enlargement, printing, and display, using large-scale prints, typologies, existing images, and digital processing. From this educational setting, Czech chose pages that had already been edited, printed, and circulated as her subjects.^*7

During the 2000s, newspaper and magazine articles moved online, and search, copying, and pasting made it easy to extract parts of a text. Czech’s magazine pages retain headlines, body text, photographs, advertisements, margins, folds, and halftone dots at once. Unlike a search result that displays only the requested phrase, the entire source page remains visible as a physical object.

Around 2010, when Hidden Poems began, Czech shifted the emphasis of her work from observing and waiting for events in streets or among people to prolonged searches through existing materials. Reading the language of articles, advertisements, product names, and record covers—and deciding which poem to seek and which page to use—became the principal work performed before the shutter was released.

Hidden Poems: Joining Search, Marking, and Photography in a Single Procedure

Czech first selects a short poem, then searches for a page in which its constituent words appear in the same sequence within another article or advertisement. She indicates the words with highlighter, pencil, lines, or erasure and photographs the entire page at high resolution. Poems by Robert Creeley, Rolf Dieter Brinkmann, E. E. Cummings, Jack Kerouac, and others emerge from magazine articles on unrelated subjects.^{*2 *10}

Chance moves from an unexpected encounter in the street to the discovery of a required sequence of words within a text. Czech can choose the poem and the body of source material, but she cannot determine in advance when or on which page the words will appear in the necessary order. Once the page is found, marking establishes the sequence, while photographic scale and framing create the conditions for the viewer’s eye to follow the same route.

A scan can transmit text in a readily legible form. Czech’s large photographs also show paper fibers, printing dots, overlapping highlighter, and traces of erasure. The handheld reading distance of a magazine becomes a wall-based encounter, and a private discovery becomes a visual procedure repeated by multiple viewers.

Bringing Concrete Poetry and Appropriation Together on One Page

Concrete poetry developed internationally during the 1950s in Europe, Brazil, Japan, and elsewhere. It treats spacing, repetition, typeface, and position on the page as part of poetic composition, working with the visual and material form of language as well as the meanings of words. Appropriation refers to artistic methods that quote or reuse existing images and texts in order to examine authorship, ownership, and originality. MAMCO places Czech’s work where these two lineages meet.^*3

Czech does not present an existing poem as her own language. She retains the poet’s name in the title and keeps the source article readable. Highlighter brings the poem’s words forward, while the article, photographs, and advertisements remain in the frame. The same word functions as part of news or product description in the source text and as part of another poem when followed in the marked order.

MAMCO uses “intertextuality” to describe the idea that a text does not arise from a single author alone but is formed through its relation to earlier language, quotations, idioms, and other texts.^*3 In Hidden Poems, this relation appears on the page as words belonging simultaneously to the source article and the quoted poem. Czech develops appropriation’s questions of authorship and origin through a method that keeps the source visible and allows two texts to be read against each other on the same page.

Switching Between the Eye That Looks at a Page and the Eye That Reads

In front of the work, viewers first register the color, photographs, margins, and typography of the page as a whole. Once they locate the marked words, the eye begins to read them in sequence, and attention to the overall composition recedes. Exhibition material from Ludlow 38 describes this movement of vision back and forth between looking at an image and reading a text.^{*8 *17}

After finishing the poem and returning to the source article, viewers encounter the same words under a different grammar and subject. From farther away, handwritten lines, dirt on the paper, and printing misregistration appear before verbal meaning. The work is not structured as a puzzle completed by finding a single answer. Its appearance changes according to whether attention falls on poem, prose, image, or page.

Large prints move the intimate reading distance of a magazine onto the wall. Up close, letters and paper surfaces become visible; at a distance, color fields and composition take over. The photograph reproduces the text while also regulating reading speed, standing position, and the path of the eye.^*6

Dividing Authorship Among Poet, Editor, Photographer, and Viewer

A single work involves the poet whose text is quoted, the writer of the source article, the magazine’s editors and designers, Czech as selector and modifier of the page, and the viewer who follows the words. e-flux describes Hidden Poems as engaging authorship, subjectivity, documentation, and contextualization.^*4 Their roles divide into distinct actions: writing a poem, editing an article, finding a quotation, and reproducing the sequence through vision.^*9

The viewer follows the markings and performs Czech’s reading again. The markings also prescribe the order and place clear limits on interpretation. Authorship does not pass completely to the viewer; it is shared within constraints produced by several contributors.

Hidden Poems: Turning Discovery into a Shareable Photograph

In Hidden Poems, Czech selects words in sequence from existing prose and makes an already written short poem emerge from another setting. She has distanced the work from the mystique of discovering a secret message, emphasizing instead a different way of reading in which poetic structures arise from everyday prose.^*2 The fact that the same words belong to several texts provides the starting point.^*1

Fluorescent color, underlining, and erasure act as editorial signs distinguishing source text and poem. The intensity of the marking alters the balance between their legibility. Czech calibrates photographic magnification and print size as well, allowing both texts to remain traceable.

In photobooks and artist talks, Czech presents the work through pages that are turned and read as well as through large prints on gallery walls. In exhibitions, movement of the body creates the order of reading; in books, page sequence and the hand perform a comparable role.^*13

From Poems by Repetition to Response / Response

Poems by Repetition matches the repetition of words within a poem to repeated photographs and markings. Voyelles addresses vowels and the arrangement of letters, moving reading toward questions of sound and shape. The 2013 exhibition I Cannot Repeat What I Hear showed how poetry, journalism, lyrics, and letters produce different rhythms within photographs.^{*14 *5}

In to icon and Poet’s Questions, Czech extended her sources to commands and icons from digital environments, consumer products, and records. By selecting questions from existing poems and combining objects that contain their letters, she allows language to function differently as an on-screen command, a product name, and a poetic question.^{*15 *11}

For Response / Response (2024), Czech invited poets and writers to make texts responding to other poems and photographed pages bearing pencil, erasure, and reply.^*16 Earlier works found poetry within texts already in circulation; here, she establishes the conditions under which others produce new writing. The photographer’s role expands from finder to commissioner and editor, making the work’s multiple authors explicit.^*12

In Relation to Ed Ruscha and Shannon Ebner: From Letterforms to Procedures of Reading

Ed Ruscha arranged buildings and gas stations according to fixed rules in inexpensive offset-printed books, treating photographs as conceptual lists.^*19 Shannon Ebner fabricates letters and photographs them among streets and objects, bringing the shape, material, and political use of language into photography. MoMA presents her work as a meeting of poetry, experimental writing, political language, and photographic conceptualism.^*18

In Ruscha’s work, the sequence of photographs creates the concept; in Ebner’s, constructed letters and their locations alter meaning. Czech’s single image retains both the source article and the quoted poem, and the order of attention changes according to which is read. Her subject therefore includes the action of reading the same page in several ways, as much as the letters themselves.

This distinction separates Czech’s photographs from illustrations of literary works or reproductions of visual poetry. They show the form of letters while moving viewers between a distance for reading meaning and a distance for seeing the page as an image. Time spent in front of the photograph is structured as carefully as the page being photographed.

Appropriation That Retains the Source Page

Digital search and copying can remove only the needed phrase from a source page. Czech also extracts parts of a text, but she leaves the article, advertisement, photographs, margins, and paper surface in the frame. After reading the poem, viewers can return to the source subject and compare the role of the same words in another text.

Fluorescent color and orderly typography can turn a lengthy search and the politics of the original article into an attractive composition. When viewers follow only the poem, the discourse produced by advertising, news, and commodities recedes. Retaining the whole page preserves the material needed to move between poem and source and to identify which text has been brought forward.

After the poem has been read, Czech’s work sends the eye back to source article, photograph, advertisement, and paper surface. The labor of poet, article writer, designer, and photographer is not consolidated under a single author’s name; each leaves a trace on the same page. Reading appears as an action composed of meaning, distance, order, enlargement, material surface, and verification of the source.