memoir and place

Post #31 – Memoir and Fiction, Writing Alchemy – Kendra Bonnett and Matilda Butler

When is Place More than a Place?

I’ve probably mentioned that I’ve been working on my chapter about Time and Place for our new book, Writing Alchemy. And you know how it is. When your mind is on a topic, you find interesting material that you ordinarily wouldn’t have noticed, or at least not noticed its relevance.

That happened to me when I was watching the NewsHour on February 7. There was a fascinating video interview with Annie Leibovitz, the well-known portrait photographer. I’ve had one of her books on my shelf for years and enjoy picking it up when I want to change what I’m doing. Her portraits provide a fascinating way to see what at least one photographer perceives is the essence of the person. Capturing a life in a photograph is an interesting perspective for a writer to consider. If our words were film (I know, that’s an old-fashioned way to describe this), what would we want to reveal?

But the most recent NewsHour interview takes us in a new direction. Annie Leibovitz decided to challenge herself to look at landscapes rather than people. What’s interesting is that she treats place much as if it were a person. This was so similar to some of the points I was making in my chapter that I immediately paid attention.

In addition, she began to explore places and the objects of famous people –Virginia Woolf, Eleanor Roosevelt, Marian Anderson, Martha Graham, Louisa May Alcott, Annie Oakley, Georgia O’Keeffe, Emily Dickinson, Henry David Thoreau and others. She began to see how objects could be photographed to tell us something about a person. The objects helped her to better understand the person and even caused her to change her way of photographing.

The best of her travels are now in her new book Pilgrimage and a new exhibit at the Smithsonian’s American Art Museum in Washington, D.C. The exhibit will eventually tour and I certainly hope I get to see it in either New York or Minneapolis, it’s new two locations.

Well, I don’t want to spoil the video for you, so I’ll leave it now and just give you the link. The video is less than seven minutes and definitely worth your time.

Annie Leibovitz video interview on the NewsHour.

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