Robert Root

 

Note: What follows here is an example of an imagessay taken from "Once Upon a Tender Time," a chapter in a memoir in progress by Amanda Irene Rush, presently titled The Gathering Girl. It strikes me as a solid example of the way an image sets off the need for written expression. I thank her for letting me post the manuscript here.

 

I have no memory of the four of us, as a family, together. All I have is this photograph my sister obtained after our mother's death. The photo had been buried among many other photographs in a box my sister ended up carting from Colorado to Alaska to South Dakota and finally to Ohio. This picture, taken at Christmastime 1973, is a small but epic find. Enduring proof that once upon a tender time we were a family.

 

In the photo, we are sitting on my father's parents' hearth in their house in Norwalk, Ohio, a red felt wreath hanging above our heads. The wreath -- made by my Grandma Hoyt -- gets as much attention as we do in this throwaway. In our current digital age, it is the shot that would've been deleted straight off. Where's the good family Christmas portrait? The one where we are centered and focused, all smiling at the camera, looking like a family should look? It's nowhere that I can find. Having dug through all the boxes and emptied all the envelopes, having flipped through all the albums and searched every drawer, I have found only three photos of the four of us; and this one -- this dud dug out of a box my mother kept until her death, this dud my sister saved from the trash heap -- this is the only one remotely worthy of mention.

 

I call this picture an epic find as though I've never seen it before. But I'm sure I have. As a child, I spent hours poring over photos trying to make sense of who my family once was, where I came from. Revisiting this picture, I recognize it as I do all of us. I recognize the surroundings in which we're posed. Everything is familiar. If I concentrate, I can even conjure up the smell of my grandparents' house. The woodsmoke from the fireplace. The sour smell of my grandparents' holiday cocktails. The new fabric smell of those matching Christmas dresses.

 

And yet, everything seems so strange. Is that woman holding my sister on her lap really the woman who will leave my father with us in tow in just a few years' time? Will she really end up developing a chronic mental illness and disappear in ways I never imagined possible? Is that man holding me really the man who will, soon after our leaving, marry a woman who will make it her life's mission to turn him against us? Will he really, after this second wife dies, quietly drink himself to death? And these two girls. Are these the girls who will grow to feel that they never had either parent? That they only had each other?

 

The picture leaves me feeling as bewildered as I look in it. I find it hard to believe we were ever a family, despite the proof. I find it equally hard to imagine a time when my parents may have liked each other; they were so different. And yet, there's a sense of intimacy about the way they're positioned in this photo. Perhaps it's only a sense of familiarity I see. In the same box, I found similar pictures of two of my father's three brothers, each Hoyt boy staged the same -- on the hearth, beneath the wreath -- with his young wife and children. Although choices would be made in the years to come that would cause all these marriages to fail and the families to scatter like so many seeds, on this day, at least, everybody knew where and what they were supposed to be.

 

—Amanda Rush

 

The challenge of combining visuals with text may be one of deciding whether the images illustrate the words, as a supplement, or whether the images and words are integrated and interdependent. My favorite editions of James Fenimore Cooper's The Deerslayer and Dante's The Divine Comedy have illustrations by N. C. Wyeth and Gustave Dore, respectively, but these images are merely splendid additions rather than integral elements. On the Internet, the insertion of some visual separating segments of text is commonplace. Every essay or article posted in the online journal Brevity has a photograph attached, usually by an editor rather than the author; each article on the digital version of The New Yorker also includes a relevant illustration: a photo of men kissing for an essay on sex in gay novels, a still from a film or television show for a media review. At the other end of the spectrum graphic memoirs like Alison Bechdel's Fun Home or Are You My Mother? or a work of literary journalism combining text and photography like Salt Dreams by William deBuys and Joan Meyers are works in which text and image are fully balanced and harmonious, meant to complement one another. Inevitably much else will fall on different locations along the line that stretches between these two poles.

 

For me, the term imagessay refers to works in which image is integral to the essay, provided or selected by the author and intimately involved in the generation or the expression of the text. As I've mentioned before, the imagessay is usually concerned with examining the response that an image prompts in the essayist. The writing of Lawrence Sutin finds a quite different source of inspiration than Judith Kitchen relied on. In A Postcard Memoir Sutin's fascination with the way certain antique postcards affected him led him to gather a collection of his own. He claims, in his introduction, that either "certain memories of mine began to seep into certain postcards" or others "challenged me to come out after them and fight like a writer." Eventually he realized "that they were egging me on through the stations of my life." Sutin's "chapters" are usually a page long, sometimes two, with an accompanying photo of a postcard. The images are always antique, usually foreign, and objectively unrelated to the author's life, except for the ways in which they inspire in him memories or personal reflections.

 

The cover photo shows a young man in suit and bowler hat perched on a crescent moon, its face in profile, and stars in the background; in the prose that faces that image elsewhere in the book Sutin considers himself at the age of the "Man in the Moon" on the postcard: "By the time I graduated from college I was I think what you'd call a fellow who knew what was what." The image of a woman in a theatrical riding costume identified as M'lle Bianca on a postcard labeled "Gruff auf dem Cirkus" makes him consider a short-lived crush on a fellow student named Cara; a photo of "Father Holding Baby" recalls his failure at dealing with his crying infant; a photo of the "Dinosaur Exhibit at the Century of Progress Exposition" triggers a meditation on the nature of evil. In a sense the genre-crossing hybrid nature of the book resembles an interdisciplinary version of a haibun journal, with photographs substituting for haiku—the reader continually is drawn to the image despite its apparent distance from the prose and then back to the prose from the image. Over time the circumstantial and the intimate merge, until we feel in the most compelling segments that the personal is always part of the universal and vice versa, no matter how remote from one another they might initially appear.

 

From our earliest days we react to what we see in the world; it takes us a while to realize that writing can help us understand what we've reacted to. The degree of intimacy or interplay between text and image might be located on a sliding scale on which a point somewhere determines where they no longer function together as an imagessay but have become either a mere illustration accompanying a text (like those random photos on blogs) or a mere prose account accompanying an image (like explanatory text below photos on blogs). In an imagessay the image and the essay are equally essential. Can you read Sutin's texts without the images? Yes, of course, but when you read them with the image facing you, you are drawn more deeply, more intimately, into the mind of the writer. You may even find images of your own emerging in response to the reading.

 

Footnote: The ideas in this entry and the previous one are drawn from a longer article, "Essaying the Image," in The Essay Review Issue #2 (Fall 2014) 95-106. A Postcard Memoir by Lawrence Sutin was published by Graywolf Press in 2000.

 

Genre crossing happens more often than we realize in literature. Such forms as the prose poem, the lyric essay, or the haibun or prosimetrum blurring or coupling nonfiction and poetry; they fuse elements of one literary, text-based genre with another literary, text-based genre. Another form of genre crossing creates what are sometimes termed the visual essay and the video essay, forms I label as imagessay. Here we're blending disciplines, combining a form of visual media (photography or cinema) with a form of literary nonfiction. We're familiar with nonfiction as essay or literary journalism or narrative text; we're familiar with thematic exhibitions of photographs and documentary films and television shows. The idea of a visual or video essay—an imagessay—a balancing of images with text, shouldn't seem alien. Like an ekphrastic poem in which a poet reacts to and/or interacts with a work of art, the imagessay is often similarly concerned with examining the response that an image prompts in the essayist. Consider works by Judith Kitchen, for example.

 

In Half in Shade: Family, Photography, and Fate, Judith Kitchen, working from a "haphazard collection of boxes and albums [. . .] my mother had managed to save from the floods," set herself the challenge "to give 'voice' to what is inherent in the visual" and "to keep the visual from dominating, making all my thoughts redundant." She used the photographs "as triggering devices," trying, as she says, "to interact [. . .] to animate and resurrect." The cover image is repeated in the book as the subject of "Young Woman on Fence," an interrogation of an image of a young woman in glasses, shirt, tie, sportcoat, and knickers perched on a white fence with her feet resting on a narrow tire. Kitchen examines the composition of the shot, the significance of the pose, the clues to the circumstances. Her mother has not identified the woman or the place or the date and Kitchen speculates about her garb, her attitude, her background and her aspirations. The speculation leads to reflections on her own childhood: "I learned how to be a boy from my books. [. . .] To be a boy was to be free from the eyes of those who told me who I should be." It may be that all ekphrasis exposes the individual interpreting what is viewed, but here and throughout the book the generally short essays repeatedly wonder about the mother's relationship to the people in the albums and reflect on the author's sense of her mother (and other relatives) as well as her own sense of herself. In "Who" she envies an unnamed girl in a photo standing among chickens by the side of a house, with a chicken perched on her left shoulder, and reflects on the farm environment that likely existed "off-lens." "I want this moment," she writes, "but not what it stands for. Want one minute of overlapping shadow, one slapdash second of light. Quick, while she has a perch on pleasure." In "Where" she compares her childhood to that of a young girl in a photo standing with her grandfather in a cornfield—the girl and the author would have been the same age in the same year and their environment but not their family life would have been similar. In other segments she considers photos of her mother and of other family members and eventually one photograph of herself sitting on the bottom of a stepladder with a friend sitting at the top. Throughout the book we need the images to understand what triggers the prose and we need the prose to understand why the images are there. The relationship is symbiotic, harmonious, hybrid.

 

In an imagessay we can't separate the image from the essay, any more than we can separate the prose from the poem in a prose poem. The aesthetic questions to ask are whether the visual elements enhance the meaning of the text and whether the verbal elements enrich our understanding of the images. In an imagessay the relationship between image and text is symbiotic, each serving the needs of the other, as if ekphrasis might also involve the image's reflections on the text. Whenever we open a site online drawn by the promise of a text, we usually will be presented with an accompanying image. I've had some of my prose published online but haven't always had any say in the image that I also discovered there, something an editor added, perhaps because every site requires a picture. The question I tend to ask myself is, what does this image have to do with the text it accompanies? If the connection is simply random the image is merely an illustration and the work is not an imagessay.

 

Footnote: The ideas in this entry and the next are drawn from a longer article, "Essaying the Image," in The Essay Review Issue #2 (Fall 2014) 95-106. Half in Shade: Family, Photography, and Fate by Judith Kitchen was published by Coffee House Press in 2012.

 

I can't remember exactly when I started seeing family photographs in a different way than I'd viewed them when they were taken. I suspect that most of us have family pictures on display somewhere around our homes or stuffed in our wallets or purses. A generation or two ago my family collected them in albums with large pages inside transparent protective sheets, thick padded covers, each image mounted with black or white corner triangles, sometimes with identifying names, dates, and places scribbled below them. My grandmother's albums were often a little mysterious, crammed with images of people sometimes three generations older than me, friends and relatives I'd never met or even heard of. My mother's albums were more fun to leaf through because I could recognize ever younger versions of people I spent time with daily or weekly or at least once or twice a year at family reunions—grandparents and their siblings, uncles and aunts, cousins, neighbors and their children. My mother and her brothers in high school. My dad and my uncles in military uniforms. People at their weddings lined in front of church altars. Unrecognizable infants in arms below familiar faces. Some appreciation of the passage of time should have dawned on me when I sat scrutinizing those images—grandparents slim and youthful here, stout and definitely mature elsewhere; my mother a little girl in a first communion dress there, a woman in a wedding dress here—but I doubt that it did.

 

Somehow, eventually, as I myself aged and the time between album viewings lengthened, I was sometimes startled by my reaction to an image. There would be an expression I hadn't seen before on a face I readily recognized, a hint of connection or disconnection between two figures in a photo, a clue about attitude or age or health that hadn't been apparent—to me—before. I recall a photo of me on my father's lap at Christmas, perhaps the first picture of the two of us together ever taken—what did the image record? It was taken in the middle of the Second World War. He wore a Marine uniform and smoked a pipe and bent his head to look at me while I, at 13 months old, stared intently—confused? alarmed?—at the camera. Was my mother taking the picture? What was I feeling then about this guy I barely knew? This guy I'd only just met? What was he feeling about me? What did the picture tell us about our moment together? Was it a photo he'd want to show his comrades when he returned to his unit?

 

I also remember two photos of my mother with a little girl in a First Communion dress. In one my mother is lively, charming, cheerful and in the other somber, remote, distant; the little girl is solemn and almost expressionless in both. I'm uncertain of the date of the photos, clearly a gathering to celebrate the girl's First Communion. She would become, or she was then, temporarily my stepsister. Do the pictures give me any insight into their relationship? Are they both equally honest images of what both of them were feeling? Do they help me explain why that little girl (and her older sister and her father) were only related to me and my mother and my siblings for so brief a time?

 

Often now the family photographs I track down seem to invite me to interrogate them. I write a journal entry hoping to explain what they make me feel about the people in them, the occasion when they were taken, what they might tell me about who I used to be and maybe why I am who I am now. Poets sometimes write ekphrastic poems—ekphrasis is a Greek word for a description of a visual work of art—and at least one journal, The Ekphrastic Review, devotes itself to such poetry. I've actually published an ekphrastic essay there, "Perspective." When an album entry in my journal develops into something more formal and polished, I term it an "imagessay," combining "image" and "essay" into one word (and pronouncing it as if it were French, to make it sound more literary). Given our ability to add images to our Internet writing ("blogs" are "web logs," after all), we sometimes simply illustrate what we have to say with a photo or two, and the visual element isn't really essential to the blog. Sometimes, however, the image and the expression (the essay) harmonize so thoroughly that they are equally important and demand the same amount of attention of the viewer/reader, much in the way a work of art demands the same amount of attention as the language in an ekphrastic poem. You need to examine the image as well as comprehend the language. In ekphrastic prose that creates an imagessay.

 

Sometimes a family photograph needs to become an imagessay.