The purpose of this essay is to integrate the photographic process with creative writing. At first glance, one might think that the two mediums do not have much common ground. However, upon further scrutiny, one quickly discovers that is not entirely the case. Photography plays a wide and diverse role in creative writing.
When I first sat down to write this article, I was focused on the other prompt. After a few days of flipping through various photographers and their works, option B still plagued me. In the back of my mind, I kept thinking about how photography could possibly be of any use inside the world of creative writing, my major. I thought of cover art first. A lot of cover art is not pictorial in its nature, most all of it now is digital, but there are covers that do use usually panoramic scenes of nature, or are closely tied to movies These novels run headshots of the stars or action sequences from the film on the cover. Another, rather common practice in which photographs appear as the covers of books is in the genre of autobiography. Biographies usually present the grinning head of the person the book is about, in what can only be considered as a creepy cross between a mug shot and a campaign photo. Therefore, I had now destroyed my original thesis that photography and creative writing were incompatible or at least separate mediums that could not benefit from the inclusion of the other. Now to see just how deep the connection seemed like a reasonable next step.
Thinking about autobiographies and photographs led me to the next connection between the two mediums. Even though I have never seen a fiction novel with a photo spread at it center that is not the case with nonfiction in general, this is especially true in ...
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...s with Frank Gohlke’s image.(Gohlke) The process is that simple and effective. It is possible by using this process and just a little imagination for anyone of any writing skill level to create entire scenes in just a few moments.
In conclusion, it becomes clear that photography and creative writing are indeed very closely related. Whether it is on the cover or in between the pages of a book, or integrated on a website, or being used to create awareness, or even just a writing prompt on a stormy Sunday afternoon, photography is an integral part of creative writing now and in the future.
Works cited
1. Beevor Antony, Stalingrad - Viking Press 1998
2. "Ranger Rick." National Wildlife Federation, 1996. Web. 4 Dec. 2011. .
3. Frank Gohlke’s ‘Grain elevator demolition – Midway Area –Minneapolis, Minnesota 1977.
Johnson, Brooks. Photography Speaks: 150 Photographers on their Art.” New York: Aperture Foundation Inc., 2004. Print.
The window was cold to the touch. The glass shimmered as the specks of sunlight danced, and Blake stood, peering out. As God put his head to the window, at once, he felt light shining through his soul. Six years old. Age ceased to define him and time ceased to exist. Silence seeped into every crevice of the room, and slowly, as the awe of the vision engulfed him, he felt the gates slowly open. His thoughts grew fluid, unrestrained, and almost chaotic. An untouched imagination had been liberated, and soon, the world around him transformed into one of magnificence and wonder. His childish naivety cloaked the flaws and turbulence of London, and the imagination became, to Blake, the body of God. The darkness lingering in the corners of London slowly became light. Years passed by, slowly fading into wisps of the past, and the blanket of innocence deteriorated as reality blurred the clarity of childhood.
Sontag, Susan. "Essay | Photography Enhances Our Understanding of the World." BookRags. BookRags. Web. 15 Apr. 2014.
Over the last few decades, the practice of radically appropriating works of other artists has become common. The central tenet in appropriation art is to incorporate ideas and images from mass media, popular culture, advertising, and from other artists into a new work. Indeed, appropriating art is not new since borrowing from other artists is an age-old practice. For instance, painters have regularly repainted the paintings of other artists with an aim of exploring the application of their artistic style in a familiar art. However, photographing another artist’s work and claiming the authorship of the work without acknowledging the original artists poses a serious challenge to the idea of authorship. Incorporating other artists’ work into a new work is the central element of modern appropriation art.
George Baker is an American art historian who is mainly known for his writings on photography. He is still alive and is employed as a professor at the University of California, Los Angeles and an editor of the journal October. Baker studied his undergrad at Yale and got his Ph.D. from Columbia University. He has five different publications. The article, Photography’s Expanded Field was written in the October journal in 2005 and was published by MIT press. The title of the article gives a clear understanding of what the article is going to be about. It explains the expansion of photography from post modern to the digital age. The author opens up the article with an understanding of how he views photography, this
Marrs, Suzanne. Eudora Welty(tm)s Photography: Images into Fiction. Critical Essays on Eudora Welty. W. Craig Turner and Lee Emling Harding. Boston, MA: G.K. Hall, 1989. 288-289.
The Russian writer Ivan Turgenev wrote in Fathers and Sons in 1862, "A picture shows me at a glance what it takes dozens of pages of a book to expound” (Turgenev 196). Mark Twain was a living testament to that belief because iillustrations were an integral part of Mark Twain’s published work. They embellished his stories, informed the reader, and often reflected his humor. However, today’s fictional novels rarely include illustrations beyond the cover and fly leaf. This lack of illustrations has become more the norm in the digital publishing world because the illustrations often do not translate well to the digital format. My research paper will delineate the reasons that illustrations were relevant and necessary for the 19th century publication and why they are less relevant in the digital age. I will show that illustrations played an essential part in the success of Mark Twain’s books (1) because he made them an integral part of his writing, giving clarity to his written words; (2) because of the subscription publishing model of his era, and, (3) because of Twain’s dependence on them to describe his characters. However, the digital and audio publishing market of today has lessened the impact of illustrations in modern literary works. In Twain’s 19th century era, books were often a work of art as well as a literary treasure. The books I read today on my e-reader or listen to on “Audible” versions -- even Twain’s books -- almost never have a visual impact like Twain’s books had in the 19th century.
First, let us define Photojournalism and Fine Art Photography. According to the Oxford dictionary, photojournalism is the art or practice of communicating news by photographs, especially in magazines. But according to Merriam-Webster, photojournalism’s full definition is journalism in which written copy is subordinate to pictorial usually photographic presentation of news stories or in which a high proportion of pictorial presentation is used. In other words, photojournalism is news photography. Photojournalism found itself invading photography from the late 1920’s and can be defined as a spontaneous and newsworthy photographic narrative of human events. Fine Art Photography is the new kid on the block. It is usually thought to refer to the visual creation for a specific expressive or aesthetic value. This is often distingui...
At first glance, "This Is a Photograph of Me" by Margaret Atwood and "Photograph, 1958" by Patricia Young are strikingly similar works in that both poems utilize the imagery of a photograph as a communication device however, upon closer examination they differ markedly in the approach each poet takes in utilizing this same device. The similarities between these two poems are immediately obvious to the reader; both poems are written by female poets, both poems have the poet as the speaker, both poems describe how the poet feels about herself, and both poems utilize the photograph as a device to convey their message to the reader. Less obvious, is the differing approaches taken by each poet.
These aspects are strengthened by photographic representation, their connections to each other in a single image, greatly affects the audience, and demonstrates how photojournalism is capable of achieving more than verbal texts are able
To begin with, photography appeared to me as something entertaining a simple step in which one took a camera and simply shot a photograph of oneself or a friend. When I was handed my schedule for Mrs. Jones’s class, I felt as if this class had in store a special reward for me. As the days went by, Instead of being anxious of getting out of class I had a craving for additional time in the class. The class kept my eyes glued to the screen ...
directly. The rise of what is known now as a 'digital art' or 'internet art' reaches beyond the
The temporality when the camera, photographer and person photographed do not have a total control of what the visual outcome’s meaning will be. She parallels the idea of citizenship with photography, and how
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What do you consider art? Paintings, sculptures, drawings, or maybe something else. I know, when I think of art, I think of photography. Photography Is used for business, science, manufacturing, art, recreational purposes, mass communication, and more. Photography is using light to do amazing things, and some people think of photography as a story that just needs to be told. Ansel Adams probably believed this. He said, “You don’t take a photograph, you make it.” Photography has a long interesting history, like the fact that the word photography is made up of two greek words, photos meaning ‘light’ and graphein which is ‘to draw’ ! Photography also has some complicated techniques to get a hang of taking good photos. Have you heard of the rule of thirds? Or do you know how a camera works? Well, that will all be explained. Maybe, by the end you will take up photography too. This essay will explore the history and types of cameras and the basic rules for taking photographs.