writing about a photograph

A friend of mine is a photographer studying at FIT, and she recently told me she was inviting people she knew to write responses to her photographs. I looked at her portfolio online this evening, and I really like what she's doing, and there is one picture in particular that I think I could write about.

Oak Grove by Erin Kennedy

I think what it immediately speaks to me is some reminder of my childhood, growing up in rural southeastern Pennsylvania, rolling hills and farmland and new lower middle class housing developments, state parks and small towns, factories and outlets. Getting lost in the woods or wanting to, the dry autumn grass crunching beneath our feet, already tread by so many others, or laying down because of habit rather than footsteps. Small branches left where fallen. Owls and deer and country roads. All those trees older than I ever was. And ultimately, a feeling of tranquility that can be destroyed in an instant when adolescent girls reference legends and fear. I remember wanting to feel at ease and being absolutely unable to. Because of the wind, because of the bare tree limbs, the unobstructed view of the sky, the moon, the snow covered ground. The sound that might have been footsteps crunching leaves under.

But in terms of writing about a photograph, I feel as though I know very little. Funny that the more I read, the more I write, the more I research and absorb, the less qualified I feel to make a statement about anything at all. I mean, really, what do I know?

So, very quickly because I'm supposed to be working on a short story, here are a few things I've found about writing about photography:

http://uwp.duke.edu/wstudio/documents/photography.pdf
http://www.brown.edu/Students/Watershed/images/stories/pdfs/watershedissue5.pdf
http://interactive.usc.edu/members/akratky/W13_Camera_Lucida.pdf
On Photography by Susan Sontag

A Dozen Truths Every Writer Needs to Know About PhotographyBy ERNEST H. ROBL
"Though writing and photography are the two processes that fill up the majority of the editorial space in publications, few journalists manage to be successful at both because the two processes are not only fundamentally different, but also place different, often conflicting, demands on the practitioner."
- That seems as though it deserves more time than I have to give it at the moment.

As does the topic in general, but it's a start.