What Photography Has Taught Me About Writing and Creating
Picture Poetry and Parallel Practices
“I woke up one morning and didn’t want to touch my camera,” my friend said without a hint of grief.
I had just started selling my travel photography professionally when a portrait photographer I admired told me her passion for her craft had vanished overnight.
“I waited for the urge to come back. Days, weeks, months… It never did.”
I could hardly imagine the loss — a creative pursuit interrupted, a chunk of her identity shoved into a drawer. That could never happen to me…
Could it?
My curiosity for photography surprised me in my early twenties. It was a cookbook that first reeled me in. There was a lyricism to the artfully arranged plates and props, and in the way the light spoke. Soon, I had a new hobby and an excuse to spend my hard-earned money on every pretty piece of tableware that whispered my name. My friends would tease me for photographing seafood risotto on my bed (but that’s where the best light was, obviously).
I never formally studied photography, but I dabbled in it daily, giving myself assignments and compiling albums of my favorite shots, most of which make me lovingly cringe now, a decade into the craft. When I…
