Natalie Czech is a German artist whose work makes concrete links between photography and poetry. By examining magazine articles, album covers or product packaging she finds and reveals existing modernist poems by the likes of Robert Creeley and Jack Kerouac. Czech’s new project is entitled to icon, or how something becomes an icon.
Czech focuses her attention on everyday pictograms, shorthand symbols used in visual communication that inhabit a realm between image and text. She takes pictures of items of clothing and accessories using tropes from fashion and product photography, reading the form of an icon into the contours, folds, or seams of the objects and applying them directly to the photo. As the meaning and usage of an icon vary in digital applications, the artist adds a kind of product label to the objects she photographs, as is standard practice with marketed goods:
In this way, Czech uncovers a digital form of everyday poetry and combines it with conceptual object photography.
