Writing with Images
Photography and creative writing workshops, University of Essex
Over the past few months I've been collaborating with the writer Penny Simpson on Writing with Images, a series of workshops at the University of Essex bringing photography and creative writing into the same room.
I'm always interested in what happens before and after a photograph is taken: what it's holding onto, what it's leaving out, what a viewer ends up filling in themselves. My role in these workshops was the photographic one, but writing has never been unfamiliar territory to me. I came to visual art from a literature background, and words have always sat alongside the images in my own practice. Even so, working alongside Penny and a room of people interested in writing gave me a different way into those questions than working alone does.
One moment from the first workshop has stuck with me. I made a series of Polaroid portraits of the participants, and as each image slowly developed, the room went quiet in that particular way rooms do when everyone's looking attentively.
People leaned in, started scribbling notes, began writing from what they saw. One participant told me she'd seen her sister in the image first, then her mother, and only after that recognised herself. It's a good reminder that a photograph is never just a record of what someone looks like. It becomes a place for all sorts of other things to land: memory, family, projection, heritage, etc.
Across the workshops we kept coming back to the idea of an image as a starting point rather than an answer. People staged scenes, invented characters, took their writing somewhere I hadn't expected.
Putting the two disciplines in the same room changed how people approached something as fundamental as building a character or setting a scene. Writers reaching for the discipline of a single, held image; photographers thinking in terms of narrative and voice.
Workshop
Writing with Images
With Penny Simpson
University of Essex
Workshops
Ania runs photography and writing workshops for universities and organisations online and in person.
