Writing
Photographs
To
photograph is to appropriate the thing photographed it
feels like knowledge and therefore like power. Susan
Sontag Photographs
are refugees from their moment. Halla Beloff
If you
substitute poems for photographs and to
write a poem for to photograph you can see
how much photographs and poems have in common.
Photography and writing are not transparent: there's
always the writer's viewpoint to the poem and a
camera-angle to the photo at one end of the process; and
at the other end are readers and lookers with minds of
their own. Photos and poems are fictions but these
fictions may catch the essence of the original more
accurately than a false attempt at an unobtainable
authenticity.
Exercise
- Students
brainstorm the vocabulary of photography: eg,
snap, catch, take, shoot, film, still,
composition, portrait, develop, focus, frame,
pin-up, collage, album.
- Students
decide whether the narrator/poet is the
photographer or the subject.
- Students
think of an occasion, moment or storyline for the
photo/poem.
- Students
decide whether the photo/poem is going to depend
on sight or whether they will include the other
senses where the photographer x-rays the
subject's thoughts.
- Students
think up a possible first line: eg. You won't get
away or Don't point that thing at me.
- Redrafting
the poem might be compared with taking a lot of
photos and using the best one, or developing the
negative and printing and finally trimming and
framing.
Example of
poem by a Year Nine pupil, Laura Fawcett from Myers Grove
School, Sheffield.
The Person
Beneath
| 'Laura!'
This is the shout I hear from the hall. |
'No,
get out, go away, 'I scream, and hide. |
| He
got a film for his camera yesterday. |
The
blankets are pulled right over my head |
| I
know what's coming next. |
The
flash goes off a photo is taken. |
| The
door moves inward, the floorboards creak. |
The
dyed blue sheets are all that can be seen. |
| A
face appears behind the door, partially |
But
in a way isn 't this telling something |
| Covered
by the waiting camera. |
About
the person beneath? |
Points to
note about this poem:
- Structure:
two stanzas of six lines each, the first dealing
with the approach of the photographer, the second
with the narrator's reactions.
- Image:
the whole idea of the photo has been used as an
image for the relationship between the two people
in the poem.
- Apart
from the two characters, the poem is anchored in
place and time and has a chronology/ narrative
line.
- Language:
straightforward language depending on nouns and
verbs. Very few adjectives or adverbs. Verbs are
in present tense, mostly finite. The writer has
chosen the passive voice and usually I would
advise writers to use the active voice, but in
this case it is used to good effect as it
emphasises the narrator's helplessness in the
face of the photographer.
© Liz
Cashdan
|
