Philip Whalen and Aram Saroyan collaborated on this project called "The Children." Saroyan took the pictures while traveling around the world when he was fourteen, not much older than many of his subjects. Whalen wrote the text much later.
This to me, is a perfect example of a successful collaboration between a poet and a photographer, which is an extremely difficult kind of collaboration to pull off in the first place. In a photo/poetry collaboration you always run the risk of the poetry being explained by the photographs, but here the poems impose layers on top of the photographs, they deepen the mystery and whimsy of the pictures. There are pictures taken in Belgrade, in many towns in Italy, and in America. The poems that accompany the American pictures contrast in tone with the poems that accompany the Italy and Belgrade photos; they have the same playfulness, but a political urgency enters their tone and a considerable amount of innocence drops out of the poems:
I keep trying to figure it out
I spent one fortune getting
Dick Nixon elected,
I spent another one on the CIA
I borrowed money from the bank
to support our local police.
What the fuck is the MATTER?
Why don't I get anything
for my money?
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