The Man in the Photograph
by
Noelia Ramon
Publication date
ISBN:
March
2025
978-1-023248-07-6
About the author
NOELIA RAMON is a journalist, poet, photographer and filmmaker—a storyteller who weaves poetry, image and prose into a singular, evocative language. She has been writing this book for five years, but in truth, she has been writing it all her life. Writers do not begin with a first word; they begin the moment they start seeing the world as story—collecting, shaping and capturing fragments of time. Born in Spain, Noelia has called Australia home for many years, and in Sydney poetry became her true language. Her work is deeply introspective, tracing fleeting moments, strangers and the quiet beauty of the human experience.
The Man in the Photograph is her first book—the first of many.
About the book
THE MAN IN THE PHOTOGRAPH is like a city glimpsed through the windows of a train on which we travel. Art—including the two arts Noelia Ramon practises here (poetry and photography, not to mention book design)— frames and catches moments, stills the stream of time, and lets the artist and her readers, her viewers, keep them; by extension, we keep our own moments again and again in imagination, in memory.
And it is mostly the “ordinary things” (a yellow chair, a teal teacup, a gull, a woman with an ice-cream, shadows, a cat in a pram, a bamboo thicket, a jazz busker, a kookaburra by the Opera House, a man in a photograph) and the ordinary moments (skating the botanic gardens, taking a dance class, remembering a dream of one’s father, observing two lovers kiss, meeting passers-by camped by a beach, walking in the rain, drinking coffee at a café, visiting an art gallery, feeling useless and far from home) that Noelia Ramon attends to and seeks to care for in these poems. Reading this book, feeling its design—cutting back and forward in time and place, switching point of view as in a movie—you might feel, even if the poet did not always feel it herself, that you have fallen back into a deeper coherence with the way things really are, and back in step with your one intended life.
... there is yearning in the poems.... These pieces are fragments aching for a wholeness they don’t quite know how to forge—among themselves and between the self and the world in its flying, falling pieces. These poems, like all of us, long to belong, and they look for the poet’s “one dear and perpetual place” in the Spain she grew up in and in the city, Sydney, where she has landed and settled, and in the deeper past incarnated in some old buildings here and represented in the figure of a man and his time, almost a hundred years gone, depicted on the hoardings where new construction is going on. She looks for the rest of who she is or was or might be in remembered dreams, in the flight of birds and the fall of rain and the lives of others and on the road in her beloved Delica and in the mirror where she braids her hair. She looks for, and finds fleetingly, that coherence the Great Ones promise, in the kitchen and in her books and out the window and in her lover’s face...
“Things as they are what is mystical,” Robert Gray has written. And “matter is profound,” but as fluid, deep, and compelling as the“surface of the waters.” And it is all we should hope to know of Self. And so this book of Noelia’s proves. Give yourself to it as she has given herself to it. Fall with it, fly with it, forget with it, land with it. Back in the depth of your own, your one and only, life.
MARK TREDINNICK