let the lamp affix its beam.

The only emperor is the emperor of ice cream.
Two or three summers ago, I began to notice my own propensity for making pictures about ice cream. (Funny how it’s easier to recognize patterns in other people’s work than in one’s own.) It’s not like I’m an ice cream fanatic or anything…although, I’ll confess, if I’m on a road trip, I’m constantly vigilant for soft-serve stands. One year, Evan and I even set out to document every ice-cream excursion, using the Holga, the Nikon, or just a cell-phone camera. Not to be grandiose about it, but perhaps I take these images because they connect different times and places in my life; ice cream may not be a universal truth, but it appears at regular intervals.

When students are “stuck” for photographic ideas, sometimes I suggest the concept of using the camera as a sketchbook; when you record, draw, or jot down the images that attract you, you begin to notice the patterns. I don’t think it’s important to know why, but I do think it’s important to keep doing it–something significant is at work in the psyche.

Ever since I took Modern American Poetry in college, I’ve loved and struggled with the poems of Wallace Stevens. I love them because they strike a deep chord, but of course I struggle to understand them–only in that class, led by poet and wonderful teacher Robert Pack, did I ever get a glimmering of what lay beneath the surface. When I first assembled the “ice cream pictures,” of course the Stevens poem “The Emperor of Ice Cream” came to mind. I sought out some interpretations of it just to work my way through the words and images. In one passage from Wallace Stevens: A Mythology of Self, Milton Bates notes that ice cream serves as “a symbol not only of life’s ephemeral pleasures but also, as Stevens told R.P. Blackmur, ‘of the materialism or realism proper to a refugee from the imagination.'” Is it overplaying the metaphor to say that photography documents ephemeral pleasures and creates a proper sense of realism? Why else are we compelled to record these places and moments?

Let the wenches dawdle in such dress
As they are used to wear, and let the boys
Bring flowers in last month’s newspapers.
Let be be finale of seem.
The only emperor is the emperor of ice-cream.

from Wallace Stevens, “The Emperor of Ice Cream”