The Photo Experiment

Summer semester has begun and I’m back to teaching one of my favorite courses, Intro to Creative Writing. Only this time, I’ve added an experiment: every day each student (myself included) must take one intentional photo.

In fact, this is the only homework. Summer terms at Rutgers-Newark are five-week intensives in which we meet four days a week for nearly two hours a day, allowing us the benefit of doing most of the reading and writing together in class (a worthy subject for a future post). Outside of class, our principal goal is to: “Observe our surroundings and, once a day, take a photo/create an image using any device (phone, DSLR, film, pen and paper) of something that catches our eye, tells a story, elicits an emotion…” Most importantly, “it doesn’t have to be ‘pretty.’” Here are a few of mine:

Week one, while discussing literary images, students chose one of their photos and described it in detail to the class, then presented the photo to see how closely it matched the pictures generated in their classmates’ minds.

Week three, while discussing character and setting, we mixed and matched photos and used the unique combinations to generate prompts.

Week four is coming up, and as we embark on writing personal essays, the plan is to create photo archives to inform them.

But my hypothesis—or hope—for the experiment is much bigger than writing exercises or cataloguing information. And already, there are signs that it’s coming to fruition.

(Another one of my daily photos: people scroll on their phones amidst canon statues on Riverside Dr., NYC ↑)

Before I started writing, I took photos—lots of them—got an associate’s degree in photography from the Art Institute of Colorado, worked at a portrait studio, spent my free time wandering Denver and the Colorado Rockies alone with my camera, or in the dark room listening to audio books and developing more than just photos, but my sense of composition, contrast, and framing.

(Some of my favorite shots from my old portfolio of musician portraits ↓)

I often talk about my music training as being integral to my writing practice, and it is (more on that in a future post too), but just as important is photography. A recent conversation with a fellow writer, photographer, and MFA cohort-mate reminded me of this and inspired the experiment (thank you Kailah!).

We discussed the many ways photography has informed our writing: how it taught us to catch and guide a viewer/reader’s eye through a scene, how to employ depth of field in a character’s POV, or shutter speed in plot, stopping or blurring moments in time, and how to use the frame of the story, page, paragraph, sentence, to highlight what is within and gesture to what is beyond.

There are, of course, other ways to learn these things. One of my undergraduate mentors, Michael Thomas, had us make playlists and do similar exercises analyzing songs. Countless writers from Bashō to Wordsworth to Woolf have discussed the connection of inspiration and craft to walking. In one of my favorite books on writing, Haruki Murakami links it all to running. I’ve found similar personal links through meditation. And sometimes the best, most direct way is through the medium itself.

This is to say, just because the experiment has proven to work for me, it may not for everyone. But I believe it is worth trying, at the very least as an invitation to consider how to practice such techniques off the page—to integrate writing with something you do without expectation, simply for the art and joy of it.

(Three photos I’ve collected as inspiration for stories. The third one inspired my story, “One Thousand Words for Dark,” published in Beyond Words Issue #29 ↑)

While I could spend more than five weeks on any one of the above lessons, my students are already catching on to what I believe is the most important one. During my last class, a student shared that since beginning the experiment, she’s been noticing her surroundings more and finding more interesting photos to take.

To break the habit of mindlessly snapping infinite photos because we can, or worse, not looking at all, and take at least one intentional photo a day, we open our eyes to what’s around us. We find that no matter where we are, if we look closely enough, there is always a shot, and there is always a story.

---

In other news, my new record, Selling the Sky - EP is available now on all streaming platforms. Here’s the first track, “Since I”:

In its own way, the song is also about opening up one’s senses to what’s around them. It’s also the first album cover I drew myself (before “Mapmaker”: a potential new outlet for cross-medium explorations), as I begin practicing for an upcoming class that I’ll be teaching on comics and graphic novels. The background is a window snapshot from a recent flight, and the self portrait is inspired by the amazing work of my friend Mary McClure who designed many of my previous album covers.