1,000 words

Pictures, clues, cross-cultural conversations and more

Nov 15, 2019

Ok, in fact, this week’s newsletter is about 2,500 words—and it includes a handful of pictures worth as much as that and more.

Craft: 5 ways of looking at a photograph

A couple of weeks ago, my sister and I found a photo album for sale in a local antique shop. It’s roughly 9 inches by 4 inches, its spine bound with a black shoelace-like cord threaded through two holes, so that the black matte pages could be added and subtracted easily. The images inside seem to date from the 1920s, and a small cardboard label declared that it had come from Mabou, Cape Breton—the place my mother’s parents are from, and where they too would have been in the 1920s and 1930s. Of course, we had to buy it. As we flipped through the pages, we wondered about the landscapes, and whether we could match them to current images that might help us nail down exactly where they’d been taken. Who were the people? What were their relationships? We started to stitch together a story, with no way (yet) of knowing what might be fact and what might be imagination. Usually, photo research starts with the story and the photos help fill in the details. Here, we were starting with the photos and trying to build a story around it.

When you’re writing about the past, whether in memoir, other forms of nonfiction or even fiction, it’s common to look for photographs from that time and place to prompt memories and pluck details. But what should you actually be looking for?

On the surface, you’re looking for descriptive details: What do the people look like? What does the place look like? But that level of “looking” can easily become the equivalent of a “police description” of the photo: the suspect is six-foot-two-inches tall, with brown hair, a cleft chin and a spider’s web neck tattoo. That kind of description is worth having, but it isn’t everything that can be gleaned from a photo. Here are some other ways of looking at photos and using them to strengthen your insights as well as your descriptions.

Ignore the people: We tend to focus on the humans in the photo, especially if the humans are us or people we know. Learn to look around the people in the image, to see what else is captured there. Get out the magnifying glass—or scan the image at the highest resolution you can and enlarge it on screen. What items are around the people? What products show up? What are the furnishings like? The wall and floor coverings? Can you make out brand names on appliances or other items? Are there pets or animals in the image? What do they look like? Do they look well cared for or neglected? What do the architectural details of the building or fixtures tell you about the income or status of the people who might occupy this space? Are there cars or other vehicles in the shot? Trees or plants that might give you an indication of exactly where and what time of year the photo was taken? I’m a perfume hound, so I know that the shape of particular perfume bottles that show up on nightstands and dressers in old photos can help date the image. So can labels on commercial food products—a Heinz Ketchup label in 1972 is likely different from one in 1982. Floor coverings, appliances, vehicles and more can also help date images. But as importantly, all of these things convey clues about status, about what might have been valued by the people in the photo.
Look at the bodies, not the faces: Eyes draw us in, and so we can tend to miss what the rest of someone’s body might tell us. What is their posture like? Are they formal or relaxed? Are they smiling easily or stiffly—or not at all? If there is more than one person in the photo, what does body language indicate about their relationship or comfort with one another? What are their clothes like? Haircut? Eyeglasses? Does their posture indicate that they are posing, or were they caught in a moment?
Do a then and now: If you are looking at an image of a particular building or location, try to find a current image of that place. If your photo is of a person, try to find a later image (ideally a current one if that applies, or one taken later or earlier in life). How did the place or person change over time? What does that tell you? What questions does it prompt you to want to explore?
Look at the back of the photo: If you’re dealing with physical photos, always look at the flip side. Has someone written a note, identified the people or place? (The landscape above has “Great Bras d’Or looking East” written on the back in pencil; the back of the photo of the women is blank.) Is there a date stamp on the image (and keep in mind that for photos taken on film rather than digitally, the date likely refers to when the image was printed, not necessarily the date it was taken)?
Look at the quality of the photo itself: If it is a physical photo, what quality of paper was it printed on? Is it pristine or creased and battered from handling? Does it look like it was kept in a wallet or pinned to a fridge or bulletin board? For digital and physical photos: Is it crisply focused and professional looking, or blurred and more casually cropped?

All of this, of course, supposes that you have photos to examine in the first place. And some of us are lucky enough to have them—or are burdened by too many of them. My basement contains about a half a dozen banker’s boxes of slides and photos taken by my father, and we’ve already done two culls to get us down to this stage. I’m not sure how many we started with, but I’m guessing around 15 boxes.

Not sitting on a lifetime of someone else’s photos (or your own)? Some sources to consider:

Museums and archives for the location or subject matter you are researching: The big name archives and museums will likely pop to mind, but also consider universities, service clubs, associations and historical societies related to the location or subject matter. Hospitals, municipalities, schools (remember yearbooks?) and school boards might also have materials.
Newspapers and magazines: My colleague Dean Jobb, author of a number of historical nonfiction books including The Empire of Deception, swears by Newspapers.com, an ever-growing database of over 15,000 newspapers from the 1700s through the 2000s.
eBay and online auctions: This tip is from Dean as well—search eBay and set up an alert for search terms related to your subject area. Postcards, magazines, ads, books, maps and other photographs may all show up in online sales.
Interviewees: Always ask interviewees if they have photos or know where you might find any related to your research. Tip: Photos can be a great prompt for interviewees as well. Having an interviewee look at photos with you can lead to questions you wouldn’t have thought to ask, and details your interviewee wouldn’t have thought to share.

What I’m Reading: Cherie Dimaline’s Empire of Wild

I finally tried the Halifax Library Kiosk at the Halifax Airport, and was delighted to find Cherie Dimaline’s new book Empire of Wild on the shelf—so delighted that when I got back, I returned the library book and bought my own copy. I crossed paths briefly with Cherie almost 20 years ago (yikes!) when we both worked at Chatelaine, and it’s always thrilling to see someone from IRL have publishing success—and Cherie has definitely had success: she won the Governor General’s Literary Award with her last book, The Marrow Thieves, a dystopian YA thriller that even OA like me enjoyed. Empire of Wild is her adult follow-up, a gripping read that takes you inside a modern-day fable set in a Métis community on Georgian Bay. It is funny, political, passionate, scary—and yes, even with characters that include a werewolf-like Rogarou, deeply real. For me, one of the greatest pleasures of reading is getting a glimpse into someone else’s life and culture, and I am deeply grateful that novelists like Cherie, Tracey Lindberg (Birdie), Eden Robinson (Son of a Trickster and others) and other Indigenous authors of fiction, poetry and nonfiction are sharing their worlds and experiences with readers. I can only imagine how important these books are to Indigenous readers, and I’m glad to be among the “other” readers who are lucky enough to benefit from the sharing of these stories. I’m about halfway through Empire of Wild, and from a craft perspective, I’m watching Cherie’s plotting and pacing with admiration, while enjoying her crackling wit and razor-sharp images:

About skinning a rabbit: “The rest came out like a lady unzipped from a gown.”
“In the upturned palm of the valley sat the tent from the parking lot.”
“Joan had grown up with stories. They’d covered her childhood, expanding and connecting until they tucked around her like a patchwork quilt. She didn’t mind them when she was very small, but around age seven they started to feel like the worry of old women with more time than teeth.”
“He lit a cigarette and put it to burn in the crystal ashtray that rested on the wide arm, its small light winking like a buoy.”

Other Good Stuff

Read: The wonderful Lynda Barry—recipient of a 2019 MacArthur “genius” award—has a new book out: Making Comics. I loved Barry’s Ernie Pook’s Comeek from the time I first found it nestled in the back pages of Toronto’s alternative Now weekly in the 1990s. I’ll be looking up her latest book, but for anyone seeking guidance on creativity or teaching, I recommend her 2014 book Syllabus: Notes from an Accidental Professor. It is a joy to roll around in and will make you think about teaching and creating in new ways.

Watch: I saw Korean director Bong Joon-ho’s Parasite last week, and it has stayed with me. Billed as a black comedy thriller, it is…well, much more than that. It is funny, it is dark, but it’s also deeply human and humane. I cared for every one of the characters—even, and perhaps especially, the ones I first found a bit off-putting. I won’t spoil the story, but I will say this: I’ve been thinking ever since I left the theatre about who, exactly, is the parasite in this tale.

Listen: On a long trip this week, I loaded up my phone with podcasts, and spent the time listening to the voices in my head. Among the conversations I most enjoyed: A Phone Call from Paul, with the New York Public Library’s Paul Holdengraber in conversation with Alexander Chee

and an On Being episode featuring Ta-Nehisi Coates in conversation with Krista Tippett. Both conversations touched on issues of cross-cultural understanding (among many other topics), and I found Coates’s responses particularly enlightening, especially around the questions that BIPOC writers so frequently get about “How do we make things better?” His response, in a nutshell: that question often comes out of the discomfort of white audiences who want BIPOC writers to reassure them that things can get better—and who want a quick solution to problems that have been with us for centuries. Knowledge, not simplistic hope, Coates contends, is what we need if we’re to face society’s challenges and inch towards change. I’m not doing his thoughts justice—you really should listen to the podcast and hear him yourself.

Book Industry Stuff

Speaking of library kiosks: Two recent stories about other books-in-transit—boat libraries in Sweden and a tiny-home/bookstore that travels through France.
Yakkety-yak: There’s a new report out about “spoken word audio”—podcasts, audio books, news, sports and talk radio—from NPR and Edison Research. There’s some fascinating stuff in it, and while it is focused on US audiences, I’d bet that Canadian trends would be similar. The “timeshare” of this kind of content is up by 20% since 2014, with at least some of that time shifting from what we used to spend listening to music. “This shift is led by a dramatic increase in spoken word audio listening on mobile phones, and increased tune-in among A13-34 listeners,” say the report’s authors. Almost 3 out of 5 listeners are listening on digital devices (as opposed to radio), with the average American now listening to one hour per day of spoken word audio. Music listening hasn’t disappeared, by any measure—the average American still listens to about three hours of music a day—but that share has slipped with spoken audio gaining as music loses, and with listeners aged 13-34 leading the way in the shift. Audiobook and podcast listening are both at an all-time high, with 50% of the US population having listened to an audiobook in 2019 and 51% of the population having listened to a podcast in that same period. Need some audiobook recommendations? Check out these lists from Wired UK and Good Housekeeping. Looking for some new podcasts to add to your roster? Check out Esquire’s list of the year’s best (so far).
Another gap in my reading history revealed: I’ve never read any Dorothy Sayers, and perhaps more surprising, given my appetite for TV murder mysteries, haven’t watched the Lord Peter Wimsey series based on her books. But I’m going to search out her 1935 book Gaudy Nights, described as an overlooked gem in a recent New Yorker article, with Sayers herself dubbed “the godmother of feminist detective fiction.” New Yorker writer Nora Caplan-Bricker’s description of what great mysteries do is spot-on:

“In the best detective stories, the truth that’s uncovered isn’t limited to the name of the culprit. Mysteries, like works of horror, transmute nebulous fears into tangible dangers. The genre lends itself to exploring anxieties about the unknown and unknowable—shadowy territory that, for Harriet and many of the detectives who’ve followed, includes the contents of their own minds, or the substance of their own personalities.”