Creative nonfiction writer and novelist, Judith Kitchen shares with us a fruitful exercise she created for those of us searching for new ways to use photographs to inspire our writing.

A photograph is both a pseudo-presence and a token of absence. . .

— Susan Sontag, On Photography

Traditionally, photographs have been used in nonfiction as confirmation. Placed in the middle of the biography, they confirm events, give face to people we’ve met in print. Scattered throughout the memoir, they attest to the truth of what we’re being told. This exercise is intended to move beyond the realm of confirmation, making the photograph a part of the text itself.
 
They say a photograph is worth 1000 words. Well, this exercise forces you to cut out those 1000 words and find another 1000 words that cannot be replaced by the image itself. Your job, then, is contemplation. Speculation. Meditation. You must surround this photograph with the thoughts and feelings that well up in you as you examine it for what it might reveal — about yourself, your memories, your assumptions, what you know you simply cannot know. You must probe its contents, and then move beyond its boundaries, thinking about what it doesn’t say, what isn’t in the frame.

The exercise is simple.

1. Begin with a photograph — one that has some personal meaning: maybe a photo of your mother before she was married; your grandfather standing next to his father, a man you never knew; a place where you used to go on vacation; an album you found at a garage sale, a stranger’s life sold for a dollar; your childhood pet; yourself at the age of seven, your lost tooth grinning up at you; an odd snapshot from the box on the shelf, someone you vaguely remember, but who?

2. Now come at the photograph from many angles. Look at it as a physical object. What is there? Look at its subject. Who inhabits its spaces? Examine the emotions it evokes. Ask it questions. What is your relationship to this scene? Who is taking the photograph? And don’t forget to observe what is not there — sometimes absence is what it is all about.

3. Keep in mind that you may know the people in it, or the story behind it, but that your reader does not come to the photograph with any prior knowledge. Your job is to make it matter to readers as much as it matters to you — and in the way that it matters to you. You can write about the photograph, but not mere description, since you must keep in mind the 1000 words the photograph could make redundant. If you want to tell its story, you will need to find words that do it justice. Bring to your reader what looking will not provide — the smells, the sounds, the texture of the day. You can write from the photograph, using it as a starting point, expanding on it until it comes alive for the reader, as it has for you. You can write to the photograph, speaking directly to the person there (even to your earlier self), or you can write it into being, telling its story right up to the moment of the camera’s click. You can write around the photograph, or comment on it, moving in and out of its physical presence, making it a central part of your written text — necessary to it, and yet somehow removed from it as well.

4. Put in enough descriptive words that, even without the photo, the reader would “see” its sepia tint, the color of rusty water; or the odd angle of the shadow on the old man’s face; or the serrated edge of the white frame that cuts across your uncle Henry’s silhouette, stranding him half-in, half-out of the scene — as he seems to be in your memories, only half present, kind of ghostly. But move beyond description into the “tone” of the moment. Capture how it felt to slide down that slide, how high it seemed as you climbed those steps that, now that you look at it, was really not very high at all. The exhilarating, free-from-adults playground world. Wonder about your mother as a young woman, before you were born: what were her dreams? Where did they go? Why did she cut her river of hair? Give that stranger a life he may never have lived, but one that connects him to you in the odd, imaginative space that exists between you now that you own a piece of his life. Think about what is gone, how things have changed, what the photo holds for all time. Think about the nature of time.

5. Find just the right title — something to give what you’ve written a context, a position or a stance from which you are looking. The final thing you should do is decide whether or not your words actually need the photograph to complete the text; it may just be that you no longer need it at all — that you’ve written the 1000 words that are worth one photograph.

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What this exercise does it unlock your meditative voice and give it a focus. It allows you to step in and out of the “present” of your piece, saying “perhaps,” and “I wonder if,” and “Now it seems as though.” By directing your own attention to the object itself — the photograph — you become a narrating sensibility; in other words, you find a “voice.” The reader comes to know you by the way you have been thinking, and that is the very essence of nonfiction essays and memoir.