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B.A. Van Sise

As a trip through his website quickly reveals, artist B.A. Van Sise is enormously and multiply talented.  As a photographer,  he works with equal success in the street, travel, editorial, documentary, and conceptual idioms and, as an author, he writes essays, flash fiction, reviews, creative non-fiction, literary fiction, and of course, poetry.  His extraordinary projects range from landscapes of neglected corners of America, in Elsewhere, to Invited to Life: After the Holocaust, stories of survivors’ making new lives after that horror.

"I believe, and it’s a hill that I will die on with a smile on my face and a song in my heart, that poetry and photography are the same medium.  Both require, in a way other art forms don’t, presence.  A sculptor doesn’t need anyone in front of her to liberate a man from the marble; Picasso could paint and Stephen King can write without having weird cube women or murderous sewer clowns around, respectively. But a photographer has to, has to, has to be physically present, and a poet has to, has to, has to be emotionally present, intellectually present.  You have to be present for both."

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