Snapshots

Featuring micro-essays inspired by a photograph from their personal archives, this collection offers a snapshot into the lives and interests of a diverse group of writers exploring the relationship between image and word.

The authors of the resonant essays in Dinah Lenney’s beautifully edited anthology explore the poignant mysteries embedded in even the most unassuming snapshot, reminding us that, while a photograph is a record of a vanished moment, it is also alive to the ongoing evolution of memory and self-knowledge.

Snapshots gets at the complexity of ekphrastic writing in our contemporary moment – highlighting the ways in which a photograph still prompts intellectual interrogation, and revealing the intricacies of creating literary work through the careful exploration of an image.

Snapshots embodies the best version of ekphrasis: the images catapult the writers’ imaginations, drawing from one art form, transforming it into another, then offering it to the reader to keep the conversation going. This collection speaks from art, through pages, with words so inviting you could listen for days on end.

Dinah Lenney has served as core faculty for the Bennington Writing Seminars and in the Master of Professional Writing Program at the University of Southern California. A longtime nonfiction editor at LARB , she herself has published several books in the genre, including Coffee (as part of the Bloomsbury Object Lessons series), The Object Parade and Bigger than Life, and co-edited Brief Encounters: A Collection of Literary Nonfiction with the late Judith Kitchen. Dinah's essays and reviews have appeared in the Los Angeles Times , The New York Times , and The Washington Post among many other publications.