The exercise is simple. Begin with a photographone that has some personal meaning: maybe a photo of your mother before she was married; your grandfather standing next to his father, a man you never knew; a place where you used to go on vacation; an album you found at a garage sale, a stranger's wedding dress you bought in a thrift store for a dollar; your childhood pet; yourself at the age of seven, your lost tooth grinning up at you; an odd snapshot from the box on the shelf, someone you vaguely remember, but who?

Now come at the photograph from many angles. Look at it as a physical object. What is there? Look at its subject. Who inhabits its spaces? Examine the emotions it evokes. Ask it questions. What is your relationship to this scene? Who is taking the photograph? And don't forget to observe what is not theresometimes absence is what it is all about.

Keep in mind that you may know the people in it, or the story behind it, but that your reader does not come to the photograph with any prior knowledge. In fact, the reader will not see your photograph.

Your job is to make it matter to readers as much as it matters to youand in the way that it matters to you. You can go about the photograph, but not mere description, since you must keep in mind the thousand words that the photograph could make redundant.

If you want to tell its story, you will need to find words that do it justice. Bring to your reader what looking will not providethe smells, the sounds, the texture of the day.

• You can come from the photograph, using it as a starting point, expanding on it until it comes alive for the reader, as it has for you.
• You can do to the photograph, speaking directly to the person there (even to your earlier self), or you can write it into being, telling its story right up to the moment of the camera's click.
• You can go around the photograph, or comment on it, moving in and out of its physical presence, making it a central part of your written textnecessary to it, and yet somehow removed from it as well.