The inclusion of photographic material in poetry collections has increased significantly in recent decades. This may seem self-evident since we live in an era of visual culture. Despite the growing visuality in the literary field, the popularity of life-writing, the ambivalence between fiction and documentary, the affective turn and "New Sincerity" as an important trend in contemporary literature, photographic images in poetry collections are still mainly used in the traditional illustrative function. If the literature of recent decades is characterised by a thirst for non-textual reality, the inclusion of photographs in poetry collections could be a tangible opportunity to play with the contours of the factual and fictional, to seek authenticity, and to emphasise the autobiographical or documentary and physicality. But the potentially fruitful dialogue between the visual and the verbal manifests itself only on rare occasions in contemporary Estonian poetry1. So, why does a photograph seem not to fit next to lyrical poetry? We take a closer look at four collections of poems where photographic images are an integral part of the book, and observe how the performativity of both media changes in the interaction of word and image. We believe that the selected poetry collections represent different relationships between lyrical poetry and photographic images that illuminate why we rarely see the two media participating equally in the meaning-making process. We take a closer look at Tonu Onnepalu's epic poem The Glass Porch, Kristiina Ehin's collection of poems on family history Thirst is the Same for Everyone, Kelly Turk's work Applied Theologian, which at first glance resembles a fashion magazine, and Tonis Vilu's illness narrative A Gift to a Psychologist.
