Today's prompt is from actress turned writer and professor of creative writing, Dinah Lenney.
Prompt: Choose a photograph—maybe you took it, maybe you’re in it, maybe you cut it out of magazine just because it delighted your eye: the point is, the image doesn’t have to be beautiful or good, but you saved it for a reason, right? It means something to you.
Your job is not to describe the picture. You can—but the point is to let it take you somewhere. How does the photograph make you feel? What does it make you remember? What’s your relationship to the people or place in the picture? And, whether or not you know them, does a story come to mind? If you don’t remember when the photo was taken, that’s fine: let yourself conjecture. What do you imagine happened the moment before or after the click? What might you know about the past or future that the photographer or subject does not? Who isn’t in the picture? What’s just outside the frame, in space or time? If you could, what would you ask the photographer (or subject) now, a day, a month, a decade since the moment held in the frame? Tell us what you believe or fantasize, beginning or ending with the moment that the photo was captured.
And—here’s a bonus: Now that you’ve written about a photo you possess, one you can look at any old time, write about the one you wish had been taken; if only that moment had been captured—but it wasn’t. In this case, with this photo that doesn’t exist—describe it in living color. (Unless, of course, it’s black and white.)
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Tuesday, March 3, 2020
A headless, armless mannequin posing behind the remains of a skate shop, or maybe a bar. I'm not even sure anymore.
It has been less than two months but also 300 years.
We all lost our heads that day, none of us able to make sense of what happened. We all felt like we were helpless, defenseless, with our arms pinned behind our backs.
Except that's not true, or only half true. Outside the frame, the neighborhood was swarming with worker bees, buzzing from pile to pile with gardening gloves, brooms, trash bags. Working together, already trying to heal and clean up, eager to rebuild.
None of us realized how soon another storm would come, or how drastically different the next one would be. We all know what happened next. Ten days later, bit by bit, the city began to shut down. The cleanup had only just begun, and now so much of it is frozen in time, a brutal reminder of just how much in life is out of our control.
The picture I don't have, that none of us have, is the picture of that mannequin planted in the same spot on March 3, 2021. Will he be toppled over, choked with weeds, still surrounded by rubble? Was progress arrested by disease and economic collapse?
Or can we flip the negative over and see things in a different direction? Maybe he'll be resting peacefully in a landfill somewhere far away, the debris cleaned up, homes and businesses rebuilt and thriving. Maybe there will be people sitting shoulder to shoulder in bars and carelessly brushing past each other on the sidewalk.
I want that photo, but I'm afraid to see what develops.
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