ABSTRACT
This chapter offers an interpretation of a poem by Les Murray, 'Self-Portrait from a Photograph'. The work of Les Murray, amply and generously provides a space for pursuing the questions, inviting one to frame them in a wide cultural horizon which includes poetry, philosophy and visual art. And 'Self-Portrait from a Photograph', though some thirty years old, encapsulates concerns which continue to define Murray's poetic stature. Accordingly, all the slight factors of the image are points determined by the 'community of bodies' which moves out from the picture's edges, but also by another community — or communion — continuous with that one yet also marking its limit, being beyond any of its particular manifestations in space or in time, any possible framing in images. Murray's poem suggests that act of pointing made emblematic by Thomas, and depicted famously by Caravaggio in an exemplary instance of absorptive realism: Doubting Thomas.
