The Photographer and the Writer

Posted on July 6, 2002 in Photography Writing

Getting my sense of life onto paper, whether between the blue lines of a notebook or on glossy photo paper, troubles me. The best way I can describe how I perceive is this: I stand on a slope, viewing the world from the side. Things roll or drift past, rarely uphill but sometimes, always obliquely. I follow them with my eyes and my sense of procipiation, that which tells me where my arm is in relation to my head, my trunk, my legs, etc.

A critic in a writing course I took last fall told me that she thought my writing sounded like I looked at the world like a camera. It was not an unkind remark, just a true one. The character I am developing in my current fiction project also happens to be a photographer. His goals for his work overlap with mine because the urges of the writer and the photographer overlap in me. The artisan who deals in the ways the light discolors pixels and the artisan who deals in the ways sound warps words both must pay attention to the details. Both must play, experiment, and ultimately share what they discover even if there is no money in it, which is usually the case for me. I can’t give up my photography for my writing and I can’t give up my writing for my photography. The two must coexist in me. There’s no denying either impulse.

The photography attains hegemony over my creative life when I am on the road. Every night, I sit at my laptop, performing transfusions from my dinky Samsung digital onto my Compaq’s hard disk. I save the writing for when I am in my own bed, at home. It’s the time of “the second tasting”, as Anais Nin confided in her journal. My notes and my first images are never final because both photo and notes can be incoporated in other projects, improved upon, revised, recolored, given an infusion of powerful verbs or a tweak of the contrast wizards.

In my visions of what it must be like to die, I find myself dreading two things, in this order: the loss of my sight and the loss of my hearing. But then, as I mention this, sitting as I am in Tully’s coffee shop and later at my desk at home, I realize that there are other senses contributing to the being in this place: the cushiness of the big arm chair; the solidity of the chair’s four feet hunched on the floor; the slightly terrible loose feel of my office arm chair rolling over the plastic carpet shield; the bittersweet relic taste of coffee-flavored ice cream topped with raspberry jam; the silver swish of a mouthful of water that redefines that flavor as it washes a little of it away. The writer and the photographer in me both love the details: the fuzz on the snout of a Malaysian hog; the half stumps left for the camels to rub themselves against; the gleaming opal light that are the eyes of a pair of zebras in the near dark of Horn and Hoof Mesa; the silhouette of a giraffe against the twilight; the caramel on raw sienna of the rhino in its enclosure by day. I love these things — even the stink of the rhino’s dung for which I have no means of photographing. The eye and the ear both love the details: the tiny pimples and pits on the rhino’s hide; the wise, stark-raving mad harlequin mask of a red river hog; the distain of a koala turning its furry ass at onlookers.

“For God so loved the world,” we might rewrite the epistle, “that He gave to us His only begotten Son to See, to Hear, to Smell His sweat, to touch His wirey Semitic hair, to taste the wine, the loaves, and the fishes He created through His miracles.” The image and the word are crude bridges into something greater, into something good. Caress the detail as Nabokov advises, if you choose either art. Isolate it so that it is clear what the viewer’s attention must focus on. The photographer does this by picking his background carefully, by cropping, by eliminating distractions. The writer does this by writing only about the things that must be in the story. Both succeed when they both fictionalize and tell the truth at the same time.