WRITER'S BLOCK 

    An Unnamed Eye grew from an old photoblog. Hard to believe, I know, but most of the images originally hail from a street photography blog I created my freshman year of college. Through the blog, I first started street photography a style very new and different to my previous experiences.  I therefore also included several new images mostly for myself to see my growth as a photographer. I still appreciate being able to revisit my old photography, to see the images in a new light. 

 

    A new light. Three perfect words to summarize the experimentation process for which this project was created. The University of Michigan Writing Minor gateway course, Writing 220, requires its students to take an original piece of work and reimagine it in three different genres. Students can then choose one of these experiments as their full, final project, a completion of the efforts started in the experiments. I continuously attempt to improve my writing, especially in conjunction with photography, and therefore decided to create a “short story cycle,” which you have in front of you today. Short story cycles are collections of pieces, which can be read as separate entries, but together comes together to tell a greater story. 

 

    Inspiration for the short stories within the short story cycles comes from a New Yorker article written by Casey Nep. Nep details their process in writing stories, from way photographs became their notebook, their safekeeping for little notes, to a safety net, when they couldn’t not recall the specific details from a particular scene. I especially appreciate the way Nep describes just how they extracted vivid imagery from old photographs to spin intricate stories. 

    

The people who inspire the photographs are very real and very unknown. Some of them I have repeatedly seen on the streets of Ann Arbor (not necessarily the determined setting of this book -- I keep things vague to allow you to place it wherever you so desire). Others, I’ve only passed by once; but therein I find the beauty of photography, the immortalization of single moment in time. An Unnamed Eye explores these brief moments, expands on them in precise detail via the particular mind of an unknown narrator. 

    

    The stories set forth in An Unnamed Eye all come from the same narrator, the “unknown eye” (get it?). To clarify, this narrator is not me, but I did find myself inserting pieces of myself and my close friends into the persona. Other inspiration of the narrator comes from Jesus’ Son by Denis Johnson, who expertly weaves an unreliable narrator into his short story cycle. The resulting narrator in my work, a fragmented, anxious, wandering soul, works to relate to the self-doubt, curious selves within us. I hope you enjoy the observations of my narrator as you set forth and see through An Unknown Eye. 

  

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Nep, C. N. (2014, February 26). A Thousand Words: Writing from Photographs. The New Yorker. Retrieved from https://www.newyorker.com/books/page-turner/a-thousand-words-writing-from-photographs

 

Johnson, D. (2009). Jesus’ Son: Stories. New York: Picador.