Larkin the Photographer

Philip Larkin with his Rolleiflex, 1957

Philip Larkin as a shutterbug? It’s a surprising revision of the reclusive Larkin image. Nevertheless, it’s a fact, as reported by Lev Mendes in his fascinating "Philip Larkin's Life Behind the Camera" (newyorker.com, “Page-Turner,” January 29, 2016). Mendes describes Larkin roaming the countryside, taking pictures with his Rolleiflex. He writes, “Rather than a poet committed to monkish isolation and routine, Larkin the photographer appears as an eager traveller through Britain and Ireland, with [Monica] Jones often in tow.” According to Mendes, Larkin took at least five thousand pictures, two hundred of which have now been assembled for the first time in a book titled The Importance of Elsewhere.

Mendes asks, “What drew Larkin to take pictures?” His conclusion – “Photography, like poetry, may have simply provided him a way of noticing and preserving” – strikes me as brilliant. It fits with Larkin’s view of poetry as set out in his “Statement” (Required Writing, 1983), one of the most compelling expressions of artistic purpose I’ve ever read:

I write poems to preserve things I have seen/thought/felt (if I may so indicate a composite and complex experience) both for myself and for others, though I feel my prime responsibility is to the experience itself, which I am trying to keep from oblivion for its own sake. Why I should do this I have no idea, but I think the impulse to preserve lies at the bottom of all art.