Between Frames

by Mark Hillringhouse

These black and white photographs and poems reveal the cultural geography of a vanishing America, using images of New Jersey that look back to a place in our collective old state highways, greasy roadside diners, abandoned movie theaters, the vanishing Main Streets of Woolworth’s five and dimes and of post-industrial inner-cities. It is an unusual collection in that the photographer is also a poet who documents the beauty amid the desolation of rust-belt America. In both verbal and visual imagery, Hillringhouse gives us a shadowed world caught between elegy and silence and that moves us from vastness to intimacy. Between Frames weaves family history, personal guilt, feelings of loss with meditations on the strangeness of being in a world fraught with beauty and decay. As the poet Gerald Stern says in his blurb, “The absolute sadness of America is in these poems and these photographs; and all the old hopes and dreams--and the rage--scattered throughout...” And as the writer Phillip Lopate states in his blurb, “...they conjure another world, shadowy and haunted, a royal vision lurking just beyond the everyday, like de Chirico’s streetscapes.”

98 pages, Paperback

First published July 26, 2012

Reviews

[Literary Review The · Rating 5 out of 5]

Mark Hillringhouse
Between Frames / Poems and Photographs
(Copenhagen, Denmark, and Florham Park, NJ: Serving House Books, 2012)

By Kevin Carey

"Between Frames" was reviewed in The Literary Review
"Loss Control" Fall 2012, The Shortlist
www.theliteraryreview.org

Mark Hillringhouse uses a combination of dramatic black-and-white images and clear, terse language in his new book of poems and photographs. The poems, each accompanied by a photo, take us on a personal tour of Hillringhouse’s New Jersey, “The aftermath of the city, that deep, red brick burning in the sun, the hush of cold dark rivers moving.” I am struck by the sadness that seems to underlie the portraits in this book. The landscape Hillringhouse creates is present but forgotten, living and dying at the same time, inviting through the honest eye of a melancholic observer. I found myself traveling with him down the aisle of Woolworth’s depart- ment store, sitting in the stands of a baseball game, riding in the front seat of his father’s Buick Skylark, past Paterson and the Passaic River. In these familiar places I got to meet the people who inspired him—the poets, the photographers, the friends and family—and I came to recognize the things we are all forced to remember, the things that haunt us, the things we can’t let go of.

[Pamela J · Rating 5 out of 5]

Meditating on Mark’s photographs, I am reminded of Henri Cartier-Bresson whose images often play with the abstract and the figurative and blur the boundaries between the world of dreams and waking. A connoisseur of his photographs cannot help but to see the lyrical quality in their stillness and in the black and white contrasts. The silent images tell stories of people and our collective past. In them we see traces of our industry and human toils in the now empty mills of Paterson. The landscapes of Mark’s photographs range from the urbane to the natural, and their intersections. Often specific to place, his poetry, rich in its imagery, conjures the familiar and universal, specifically home. In “Pancakes,” a son remembers his father, "Roused from sleep/and standing in pajamas/my father made us pancakes…” Home is both the softness of a "good ear buried in the pillow, the muffled voices,” and the violence of a slammed door in the haunting poem called “My Right Ear.”

We recognize the landscapes and faces he photographs. We know the places of and from which he writes.