“Unveiling Layers of Reality: Can ‘Snapshots’ Redefine the Art of Visual Storytelling?”
This is a personal snapshot from a conversation with my own father, a simple gesture in which an entire manuscript is being conceived.
In Snapshots: An Album of Essay and Image (Bloomsbury Academic; 2025), editor Dinah Lenney presents 36 provocative, intimate, genre-fluid micro essays by a diverse and powerful cast of writers on aging, appetite, childhood, death/grief, personhood, motherhood, reality, time, space, immigration, obsession, and so much more.
Unlike the album from my grandmother, this ‘album’ is not empty. It would be difficult to identify aspects of the human condition that aren’t in some way touched, or glanced upon, by these ekphrastic pieces. The images in Snapshots have been drawn from each writer’s personal archive, but each are presented in black and white, which brings to mind a classic, nostalgic, and dynamic translation. Black and white work is an important marriage of luminous, well-crafted, and thoughtfully composed imagery. Here we are involved in a sort of dialogue with history and tradition, but in a modern voice.
