It’s been almost a month since I posted anything on this newsletter. I’ve been quiet for numerous reasons: grief (the one year anniversary of my ma’s death was on June 3rd & the 11th anniversary of my brother’s death is on June 24th); COVID (I got hit two weeks ago and am still recuperating); life. So this once weekly prompt & pearl is turning into an occasional writing prompt and pearl, because that’s all I can handle right now and it just has to be enough… This one is number 17. Enjoy!
What else have I been up to? I created and finally facilitated a class I’ve been thinking about for more than ten years: The Word and The Photo.
In this seminar, we will explore the generative relationship between photography and creative writing by examining how writers like Patricia Smith, James Baldwin and Sorayya Khan worked with photography to reflect on and make statements about society, culture and their lives. We will dig into how this practice can shift and perhaps even evolve our writing. Participants will be required to bring their own photos to class to aid them in prompt-driven exercises, where we will use the models and our discussions as inspiration and starting off points for our own writing and storytelling.
I first became intrigued by the relationship between writing and photography back in 2011 when I found a picture of myself as a child in Meryl Meisler’s exhibit “Here I Am: Bushwick in the 80s.”
I’m the little girl in the blue shorts. This is the front of the building I grew up in on Palmetto Street in Bushwick, Brooklyn. The woman in the blue shirt t-shirt sitting on the trash can in the background is my mother. I know everyone in this photo: these are my neighbors, people who lived on the block, some in the same building.
Meryl and I went on to co-curate two exhibits together for Bushwick Open Studios. About our first collaboration, “Defying Devastation: Bushwick Then and Now” (read more about it here), Holland Cotter, co-chief art critic and a senior writer for the Culture section of The Times, wrote:
The exhibition there, “Defying Devastation: Bushwick in the 1980s,” is the joint work of the writer Vanessa Mártir, who was born in the neighborhood, and the photographer Meryl Meisler, who taught in its public schools and took pictures of its residents, the young Ms. Martir among them.
Together they tell the story of Bushwick long before the art wave got there, when, shattered by poverty, racism and civic neglect, it was seen by many as a ruin that would never rise. Now it’s rising, and art is helping it, just as it is helping art by giving its makers a place to go. Ideally such synergy would hold; it can’t, because it never does. Still it’s hard not to feel a tug of hope under those big, open Bushwick skies. “The Latest Vibe Moved to Brooklyn.”
In 2016 I was introduced to the renowned poet Patricia Smith’s collaboration with photographer Michael Abramson on the book Gotta Go Gotta Flow: Life, Love, and Lust on Chicago’s South Side (2015). How did these two genius artist get together? Abramson spent the 70s photographing, clubs and lounges in Chicago’s South Side—Peppers Hideout, Perv’s House, the High Chaparral, the Patio Lounge, and the Showcase Lounge.
Enter Patricia Smith, a poet who grew up not far from these South Side clubs. She took a look at Abramson’s photos nearly four decades later and brought his night world back to life with her legendary poetic voice. “These fiercely breathing visuals are a last link to the unpredictable, blade-edged and relentlessly funky city I once knew.” Her words and his pictures give us a glimpse into a time and place long gone.
Hilton Als introduced me to “Nothing Personal,” a collaboration between James Baldwin and photographer Richard Avedon, who were classmates at DeWitt Clinton High School in the Bronx in the 1940s, and worked together on the school magazine, The Magpie. In his New Yorker essay “Richard Avedon and James Baldwin’s Joint Examination of American Identity”, Als writes:
What Avedon and Baldwin shared from the start, as creators, long before “Nothing Personal” was conceived, was an imagination that was not so much informed by reality as inseparable from it: they saw the exceptional in the real. Not the “sublime” or transcendent, but the brutality, theatre, innocence, and confusion that made up their racist, sexist, sexy, and impossible city of love and lovelessness. New York was Baldwin’s blackness and hatred of that blackness. It was Avedon’s Jewishness and old Wasp dislike of that Jewishness, with its perceived cultural power despite its Otherness. They were both outsiders, menaced and so, therefore, perceived as menacing despite their commercial and critical success; they knew power could be positive and effective but was ultimately illusory, fake.
My thoughts and meditations came together when I found tons of pictures in my mother’s apartment after her death last year. What stories do these pictures tell? How could I use them to tell our stories?
The word photography is derived from the Greek terms phos (light) and graphs (writing or drawing), so, by definition, photography is a means of “writing with light.” Isn’t this glorious?! It also inspires today’s prompt.
The Prompt
Go grab a picture from your phone, a photo album, your book shelf. It doesn't matter what the picture is or where you have it. The point is that it’s a picture you thought of as you read this newsletter or one you thought of after reading the prompt. Make sure it’s a picture you want to examine and write about. Make sure when you look at the picture, you feel something—it can be joy, rage, nostalgia, whatever. The point is that viewing it causes an emotional reaction.
Write down the who, what, when, where, and why of the photo. What do you know about the setting? What’s the story of the picture? Who took the picture? Who is behind the lens? Spend time looking at the photo. Are your eyes drawn to one part of it? Someone’s face, their eyes or expression? Or is it someone’s hands? Something in the background? What is it that catches your attention? Describe it—both what attracts you and how it makes you feel in your body: do you tense up, smile, remember something or someone?
If you start writing about something or someone that’s not in the photo, follow the idea. See where the writing and the photo takes you. Then come back and tell me how it went. I’d love to hear from you.
The Pearl
Today I talked to a longtime writer friend who is coming out of a long stretch of not writing. She is an accomplished writer with numerous bylines, a novel, essays and more. None of this matters. She spent some time during the call beating herself up and worrying that she won’t be able to return to the page. I’ll tell you, in short, what I told her: You’re not the writer you were three years ago and you’ll never be her again. So much has happened since then, some good, some devastating, and all of it has brought you here, to this moment. And look, you still wanna write!
One thing is the same: that page is still blank when you get to it. Start slow. Start now.
A few days ago I saw an excerpt of an Oprah show from the mid-90s where Toni Morrison revealed the turning point on her journey to becoming a legendary writer: “I decided to write down what I thought if I didn’t do, I’d die. There were two things, only two: 1. Mother my children. 2. Write books.” If you had to stop writing, what would that do to you? Might you die? I know I would. The thought terrifies. Does it terrify you too? What you do with this information is on you.
Los quiero mucho,
V
Thank you for this offering. Hope you're resting well in your recovery.