025 · Interruption
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A photograph first offers what can be named. People. Clothes. Setting. Composition. I can read its codes.
Then a detail catches me and the image changes.
Photo-sketching begins with that change.1
The first response may be a memory. A phrase. A smell the photograph cannot contain. I write before the thought becomes an explanation. The image remains beside the text, even when the reader cannot see it.
What arrests me cannot be transferred intact. I cannot expect the finished fragment to disturb another person in the same place. Writing alters the encounter. The shock acquires duration and grammar.
The fragment limits that development. It lets the photograph open a narrative without closing the image around a single meaning.
The photograph starts the sentence.
Photo-sketching is a method I developed for writing from photographs. It uses visual details to prompt memory, association, and fragmented personal narrative.↩