New (Occasional) Series: #jesstorypix
At the margin between image and text
About six years ago, I started to get back into photography after years of being away from it. I had an Instagram account, but I’d never done much with it; then someone on Facebook sent me one of those meme-y challenges — something like, “Post one black-and-white photo a day for ten days, no explanations for any of them.” I got so into that that I transferred the series to Instagram and continued it for, well, a couple years anyhow.
But I was champing at the bit, because of that “no explanations” constraint. I’m both a photography and a word nerd, right? Hard for me to go exclusively one way or another…
Anyhow, I eventually started up a new series: microfictions, essentially, posted as the captions for photos I’d taken and — generally — (over-)processed within an inch of their life. Such photos had an air of unreality about them, and so the “captions” tended to the mysterious, the supernatural, the melodramatic at times. And almost all of them ended with an ellipsis, suggesting that the story didn’t end there: implicitly inviting the viewer’s participation in the full narrative.
I thought I’d post one of these “#jesstorypix” here every now and then, in no particular order. (I eventually started assigning them simple titles, too, and I’ll include those as well.) And maybe, one of these days, I’ll start adding new originals here, too.
Pestilence
The voice in his head tried to tell him he was a doctor: he'd been trained to help people when their bodies betrayed them. But, he told the voice, I wasn't trained to help myself. And now that the pestilence had reached his village, now, it was probably too late to learn...