Jonathan Harris. Click the image to read the accompanying story.

I recently started a new support job that I actually like. After working a job that made me miserable for many years, I got a job working for an online publishing company that produces gorgeous photobooks. My recruiter knows I’m a writer, and when she first called to pitch me the job she prefaced it by saying: “Well, it’s in publishing…but don’t get too excited: they publish photos, not text.”  Now a month into the job, I can see that I’ve stumbled into a veritable wonderland of artistic inspiration. I spend my days looking through photobook after photobook…bearing witness to the photographic stories of the lives of random strangers. And I’m discovering: sometimes it can do a writer good to get away from words for a while.

I ran across a post praising the benefits of linking photography to writing. Photographer/writer John Oughton says that they both offer “a way to represent a unique view of the world to others.” He also presents photography as a way to be present, “to pay attention,” and to truly see what is around us.

“Good photographers are not necessarily those with better equipment; they are those who can see something unique and capture it in an interesting form,” says Oughton. I think the same can be said for good writers. Half of being a writer is seeing, and the other half is finding an appropriate and exciting form in which to pour the results of that seeing. The world offers us so much creative material, if we only pay attention.

Visual images engage a different part of the brain than words do. Sit and breathe and stare at a photograph or a painting you love. Examine what happens in your body when you hand yourself over to the image. A story is being told without words, and when you relax the part of your mind that operates with words you suddenly open up space for a more visceral creative experience.

Need a place to start? A big thanks to Julia for introducing me to the work of Jonathan Harris. Jonathan is a writer/photographer/computer programmer who posts a new picture with accompanying story to his website every day. You can sign up to receive them by email, or you can go to the archives and bounce around. Here’s an image that really spoke to me:

Jonathan Harris. Click the image to read the accompanying story.

For me, right now I just have to show up at work and do my job. Every day I am inundated with photographs of people, places, and things. It’s so fascinating to me what people choose to document in photobooks. Usually it’s what you would expect:  weddings, births, vacations, etc. What I see passing before my eyes is the universality of the human experience. I see people of all shapes and sizes and colors and ages living their lives; they pick out the important parts and put them into a photobook. These photobooks are beautiful and ugly and profound and trite. And they each tell a story. As a writer, I just have to pay attention.