Bollaín’s Flores de Otro Mundo via Cathy Song’s Picture Bride: Photographic and Poetic Images Recreate the Art of Forming and Experiencing Community

Abstract

This article discusses how Spanish filmmaker Icíar Bollaín and Asian American poet Cathy Song relate to the art of photography in strikingly similar ways. Both artists show a keen interest in photographs as cultural and as social artifacts. Numerous aspects of photography, both as a material product and as a cultural statement, will be considered, as this article proposes that a storytelling urge becomes summoned every time one chooses to take, pose for, and look at a photograph. In other words, the photographer, the poser, and the spectator cannot escape the desire to construct a story around photography. Both Bollaín’s Flores de otro mundo and Song’s Picture Bride show us how every photographic object begets a story that configures a community in the present or to come.