exhibitions archive: novel light

Novel Light

All photographs in the show were first published on Instagram. I was one of 12 photographers who contributed to Stories and Pictures, a recent Instagram - Tumblr project that married storytelling with photographs. Nine pieces in the show come from that project.

Storygraphs and Photographs

To some degree most of us use our imagination and develop stories in our heads. You know, we create a continuing dialog from a snippet of overheard conversation. Perhaps a visual observation in nature or daily urban life sparks a thread.

These stories sometimes inspire me to photograph. More often, photographs bump into me and beg. A flash of inspiration pulls my camera out, I compose and capture without narrative. Either way something about light connects in me, like words connect during speech, motivating me to photograph.

From there, verbal stories generally remain tucked away in my subconscious or are purposely driven away by my interest in a pure visual language. This was true until two years ago when my writer friend Richard introduced me to Storygraphs.

What are Storygraphs? Basically, I do some of the work for you. You see a picture and things in your mind get stirred up — you begin to form stories, to create your own narrative. It'd be a bit of work for the viewer to develop stories for a whole show in one visit so I wrote the story for nine pieces. Right there on the same page. How easy is that? I hope you have some fun with these. I did.

One thing more. Part of the fun for me was following Richard Pelletier's Storygraph guidelines. Haven't heard about them? Get yourself over to 12x12 on Tumblr.
Anyway here I'm using the sestude format — 62 words. That's the story.