The night air is crisp and cool, just perfect for an early autumn evening. As the daylight begins to dim and turn into the indigo we know as the night sky, people are bustling around, hurrying from place to place, not really looking around them. They’re focused on their destination, wherever that may be. All you see around you are the people, the buildings, and the lights. The lights that replace the beautiful daylight we forget to cherish. Time doesn’t stop for anyone. The sky is changing colors and people are moving. They keep to themselves, talking on phones, walking their dogs, carrying bags full of merchandise. You hear the shuffle and bustle of the city night life and all you can think is “Wow, this is NYC.”

The unusual and the unimaginable, encountered during an uplifted walk. A colorful set of characters, cars among mountains, and a black frame.  All of these images ready to greet you in what seems to be a typical New York day.  Whether it’s the all too familiar feel of parked, gridlocked cars, the eccentricity found in people, or one of the busiest routes captured in a space. Colors collide, as well as natures, and there is something produced, something captured. It is what New York is about, what New York offers a simple passerby, something way beyond grasp.

A bridge that leads out into the distance, sprawling across the water and transporting a series of lights in the night sky, lies above the mighty eagle. The eagle has just taken off from the ground of the lush green park and absorbed the pride of the New Yorkers around him. There is a bright orb of light in the distance that has captured the energy of the sun and cannot hold it much longer. The dark night sky is being prodded and overtaken by the overlying branches. The eagle is about to take flight from the grounds of green pride and into the unstable orb of light, spreading an explosion of the eagle’s nationalistic power over the bridge and throughout the city.

The concrete platform shakes; the metallic beast groans. As it approaches a sense of relief permeates the air. The snake like subway slowly, but surely, makes its way into the station. As the carts rolls and grinds on the tracks and lets out a childlike squeal. Closer and closer just inches away, it slows to a stop and hisses as if to tease everyone. The heavens open up and light colors all that was gray, spirits are lifted. And this is the daily routine of a commuter.

Quitaloma
And finally a glimpse of the fortress. Velocity is continuance now happening or occurring. Process is following ideas across grass, over hummocks, to an edge that is a false edge and then beyond. Sight now tracing a footpath that leads to a curve and realizing it’s a blind curve and then beyond. Vision now forming beyond this mountain and other mountains knuckled over the far horizon, where the sky is darkening, where the rain that isn’t ending doesn’t end. Beyond the roof thatch, wind-blown grass, a thick wind, the ruins of an ancient empire. From the base, I go up.

First: Post your Snapshot NYC photos to the site and make sure to select the “Snapshot to Ekphrasis” category. Take many, then whittle and self-edit, then post your favorite 3 for class workshopping. The class will analyze and discuss the images in order to help you make your final choice. (Final submissions due on 1 November.)

Next: Practice ekphrasis by writing about your photography. What is ekphrasis? In brief, it is one particular kind of visual description that is also the oldest type of writing about art in the West.  It was a literary form created by the Greeks to make the reader envision the thing described as if it were physically present.  In many cases, however, the subject never actually existed, making the ekphrastic description a demonstration of both the creative imagination and the skill of the writer.  For most readers of famous Greek and Latin texts, it did not matter whether the subject was actual or imagined.  The texts were studied to form habits of thinking and writing, not as art historical evidence (after Marjorie Munsterberg (CCNY), at http://www.writingaboutart.org/pages/ekphrasis.html).

Then: Re-take (re-vision) the same shot, changing a critical aspect of composition (angle, tone, focus, p.o.v., cropping, lighting, etc) to find a new “essence,” or, in Barthes terms, a new “punctum.”

Finally: for each photo write an ekphrastic account. Use the first submission as your draft and revise as you proceed. As there is art in detail, try to elevate the practice to an art form in-and-of-itself, perhaps a poem, perhaps poetic prose, perhaps something new altogether. The most important element in all of this is to slow it down and re-think, revise, and reconsider, and in doing so to narrow the focus and explore contingent meanings and expressions, to sharpen the language itself, and to practice making art that your peers can see and consider and help further the process.