“Unveiling Layers of Reality: Can ‘Snapshots’ Redefine the Art of Visual Storytelling?”
In exploring their subjects, contributors make use of unexpected references to imagination and description, which at times invites the reader to interpret and interrogate the image along with the writer, the pieces in turn become a type of conversation between writer, reader, and photo. Or photographer, which is a separate entity from the final product: the photograph.
What Snapshots does so well is interrupt the concept of ekphrasis, which is not simply a written account or description of a visual piece of art (sculpture, painting, photography, etc.), but it moves within and beyond the frame. For example, in Sonja Livingston’s “Vigilante,” we are introduced to a young girl with a mop of dark hair wearing a fringed shirt and pointing a toy gun at the camera. She’s squinting her left eye. It could be Halloween. It could be the end of the essay. It’s not. This is precisely what writers do: they expand and extrapolate. Livingston takes us into her hardscrabble childhood from this photo alone, “Here’s the shame of food stamps and the child brave enough to use them.”
