Photography as Entry Point for Writing

(A found handout from my days of teaching next door to the Center for Creative Photography in Tucson, Arizona. "Visual literacy" is the buzzword, but the media-saturated students are consumers not critics. Photography provides a "safe" space for them to exercise their critical wings.)

When you are looking at a black and white photograph, you are looking at something already at least two degrees from reality. One, it’s a representation of a moment from real life (still life, portrait, etc), AND it’s removed of color. So you have a frozen moment AND an abstraction.

Consider the following –
Genre
Many genres of photography are used to categorize and understand their subjects. As with poetry and prose (sonnet, drama, novel, blank verse), there are many different types of b/w photograph: photojournalistic, documentary, creative, abstract, still life, portrait, commercial.

Composition
Darkroom techniques can enhance a photo, turn it “sepia” and “old-fashioned” or layer it with other images.

Color, light, shadow
Try this: take a photo and put it on a copier which is programmed to read only BLACK or WHITE. See what is lost in the copy from the photo.

In b/w, you don’t just have black and white. There are hundreds of grays, a deep dark black, a black with some shapes of darker black, a completely white area. You want to look for “information” in each area — is that a technical flaw or is that intentionally a purely black area on the photograph? Are the grays warm or cold? Look for positive and negative areas, which can be black, white, or gray, depending on the subject.

Point of View/Angle
Imagine yourself standing behind the photographer, imagine yourself in the photo, and imagine yourself as the photographer.

Context
From the title and date (if there is one), what can you tell about the photograph? List all the contextual elements that might be weighing on the photograph, invisibly. What larger body of work is this photo part of? What other works/artists are like this photo/photographer?

Personal Response
Finally, how does this photograph have significance to you in your lifespan? As a part of this country, as part of the human race? How might the photo have significance to YOUR reader? What would you like to say to the reader if you were looking at the photo together?