Documentary Writing: Telling Stories Through Photographs
A writing/reading course built on the idea of crafting nonfiction narratives, stories, out of photographs—documentary photographs, family album photographs, newspaper images, icons from our cultural history, even pictures that you’ll make with your own digital Nikon during the term. (If you don’t own a camera, no sweat: you can buy a drugstore Fuji for eight bucks; they work astonishingly well.) As a book author and former daily newspaper journalist of almost forty years, I have been thinking about and working with the notion of telling stories out of photographs for a very long time. My most recent book derives its storytelling structure from a single black-and-white image. And yet I’m willing to bet that you will end up teaching me things this term, showing me things I have never even thought of.
It’s a “workshop,” which suggests and implies participatory group labor. The primary goal is to get you involved in your own writing—up and running with it as soon as possible, so that you can share it aloud in class and sustain the high praise or fair criticism of your peers. We’ll have to depend compassionately on each other. It’s a mutual journey we’re on; we don’t know all the turns. That can be said of any course in any term, because the classroom is always a theater of expectation.
Narrative through and by images: that’s our mantra. We’ll employ imagination and memory, and merge them with fact, always fact, to transform a single caught instant, a freeze-frame of eternity, into an entire story, with its own structure and narrative arc. As I have already said in course descriptions, a lot of our work will go forward using the tools and techniques of journalism: good, old-fashioned reporting and research, legwork: everything that can be found out, gleaned, uncovered, dug up, stumbled upon. And then turning that reporting effort into writing gold. Think of it as the art of fact. The bite of the real. Those of you who’ve studied with me before know that expression.
One of the first pieces we’ll read in the course pack has this to say about the strange allure of family snapshots: “They are small rectangles of paper loaded with information, emotion and personal history.” Another piece describes this kind of photography as the art of “capturing little dramas with a click.” Learning how to locate the storytelling universes hidden inside the four rectangular walls of a photograph: that’s the challenge in these next fourteen classes.
Often, the more powerful the picture, the deeper the mystery to be decoded by those of us who work with words. A critic named Mark Stevens once said (he was writing of Walker Evans, perhaps the greatest American photographer of the last century): “Every great photograph has a secret. Something mysteriously and tantalizingly withheld, even when the world seems laid out as plainly as a corpse upon a table.” Lance Morrow, the great essayist of Time magazine, once said: “All great photographs have lives of their own, but they can be as false as dreams.” What you are going to discover, as you “walk back into” a particular photograph, is that the “truth” can turn out to be at surprising odds with what you otherwise thought, felt, imagined. This often proves true with photographs of your own family members. Indeed, we are going to start with—and hang with for a good while—those old, curling, beckoning, drugstore-developed snapshots from your own family albums. Maybe you’ll be in the frame; maybe you won’t. But by this time next week, we will be sharing them as a group—and then starting immediately to write about them.
More than two decades ago, I began to realize the poetic possibilities for narrative concealed inside photographs—it was as if a new world was opening. It was as if a stone was dropping into a lake and the concentric circles spreading outward. Once I began to understand how to look, there was always so much more to explore and to write about than I would have ever guessed. As in all forms of nonfiction writing, it’s about the quality of your noticing, the intensity of your seeing.
American writers as diverse as the poet Mark Strand and the novelist Don DeLillo and the memoirist Wright Morris have long recognized the power of a photograph to launch a story—we will be reading from their work during the term. We’ll also take a look at two movies. We’ll be doing a fair amount of reading from some classic pieces, and looking at other media forms, but primarily I intend for us to be practitioners, do-ers, creators of our own compelling stories. This is a writing class.
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