Choose a photograph—maybe you took it, maybe you’re in it, maybe you cut it out of magazine just because it delighted your eye: the point is, the image doesn’t have to be beautiful or good, but you saved it for a reason, right? It means something to you.
Your job is not to describe the picture. You can—but the point is to let it take you somewhere. How does the photograph make you feel? What does it make you remember? What’s your relationship to the people or place in the picture? And, whether or not you know them, does a story come to mind? If you don’t remember when the photo was taken, that’s fine: let yourself conjecture. What do you imagine happened the moment before or after the click? What might you know about the past or future that the photographer or subject does not? Who isn’t in the picture? What’s just outside the frame, in space or time? If you could, what would you ask the photographer (or subject) now, a day, a month, a decade since the moment held in the frame? Tell us what you believe or fantasize, beginning or ending with the moment that the photo was captured.
And—here’s a bonus: Now that you’ve written about a photo you possess, one you can look at any old time, write about the one you wish had been taken; if only that moment had been captured—but it wasn’t. In this case, with this photo that doesn’t exist—describe it in living color. (Unless, of course, it’s black and white.)
She looks at her hands and briefly pats a section of her fringe against her forehead. The camera man murmurs a preparatory instruction, and she hesitates at what gait to adopt, looks into the lens, slackens the muscles on the inner corners of her eyebrows, allows her cupid's bow to grow taut, her upper lip arching upward only at the sides, and her cheeks swell as the skin around her nose pulls outwards like her heart always does, although that uncontained capacity for love does not appear in her eyes like it does when she laughs. When she really laughs. When even in dark pupils one can see an embrace that swirls like yin and yang, when the musical tone of happiness and things undiscovered leaves her lips and lets itself be glimpsed for just a moment, to only those who pay attention, to only those who extend their fingers to the dew on the grass and believes in lives once lived and places of true origin.
She has given me many things. The first which were perceived even by distant relatives were her eyes, etched onto my face as an eternal blessing, as the brutal and beautiful instrument with which I'd see. Eyes... eyes that were meant for much laughter as well as many tears. Eyes whose trail inland towards the temples cupped both sunlight and rain, gets eroded and deepened, was itself a distinctive stroke in the scripture which bodies become.
I know the mechanisms to bring about the exact smile in this image. Know how the indent under the eyes feel, the curvature of the lower lid, a placement unconsciously created and habituated. A result of some sort of inner tug-of-war against absolute outpouring and well-measured guardedness, a kind of resignation that settles in the middle but gazes always in the direction of hope and affection.
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