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.
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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.
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Sontag, Susan. "Essay | Photography Enhances Our Understanding of the World." BookRags. BookRags. Web. 15 Apr. 2014.
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
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.
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
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