Under the working title of Absolute Grey—the photographic term for the exact mid-point between black and white—I have been working on a series of lyric essays that are written variously to, from, or around old photographs found in family albums and scrapbooks. Since the picture is clearly worth the thousand words I might give to description, I often find myself writing "off" the photographs, playing with different temporal relationships between the visual and verbal text. The photograph may be the link, or the trigger, but it is locked in its own era and thus it takes the fluidity of insight, or hindsight, to bring the photo alive in new ways—to give it contemporary significance and release it from its status as artifact. Thus my challenge as a writer is not to describe, but to interact. Not to confirm, but to activate and resurrect. I use the associative strategies and musical cadences of poetry to discover the various possibilities in what lies outside the frame."    |