The Conversation Between Us

Every creative life has a few unexpected gifts.

One of mine arrived in the form of an email.

At the time I was sharing a great deal of street photography on Google+. That was a little unusual for me. My work had always leaned toward abstraction, but for a while the energy of city streets, near and far, captivated me. I found myself drawn to ordinary moments unfolding between ordinary people, and I spent months photographing life as it happened before eventually returning to the more interpretive work that has always felt like home.

One afternoon I received a note from a photographer whose work I admired enormously.

He photographed flowers.

Not in gardens.

He picked them, arranged them in baking dishes, covered them with water, froze them, and transformed them into luminous works of art unlike anything I had ever seen. They were quiet, elegant, and unmistakably his.

He told me he had been gathering the courage to write to me.

He had an idea.

Would I allow him to write a one-hundred-word story for each of my photographs? He warned me that his sense of humor could be a little irreverent, occasionally cynical, and completely unpredictable. If I agreed, we would create a book together.

I said yes without much hesitation.

Neither of us knew quite what we were beginning.

Over the following year, photographs traveled east from California to Tennessee. One hundred words traveled west. Every few days another story would arrive in my inbox.

I thought I knew my photographs.

Then I read what he saw.

Sometimes I laughed out loud.

Sometimes I simply sat in silence, wondering how he had discovered a story that had never occurred to me.

Once, he broke my heart.

The remarkable thing was that he wasn’t explaining my photographs.

He was having a conversation with them.

Every image became the beginning of something neither of us could have created alone. My photographs invited his imagination, and his words quietly changed the way I saw my own work. It wasn’t collaboration in the usual sense. It felt more like two creative lives taking turns finishing each other’s sentences.

There was another conversation unfolding at the same time.

It happened as asides in the emails.

Little pieces of ordinary life began finding their way into our correspondence. We talked about our families, our children, my grandchildren, where we lived, what made us laugh, and the quiet moments that never become part of anyone’s biography but somehow become part of a friendship.

Without ever planning it, we stopped being collaborators.

We became friends.

Eventually he invited me to visit him and his wife in Tennessee.

He took me to the Smoky Mountains he loved so deeply, and for several days we photographed together. Looking back, I sometimes think the trip wasn’t really about photography at all. It was simply two friends sharing time in a landscape he cherished, and one that left an equally lasting impression on me.

The book was called 100 Words.

I’ve often smiled at that title because the discipline of writing exactly one hundred words seems almost impossible to me. Every sentence had to carry its weight. Every unnecessary word had to disappear. Yet somehow, he made those tiny essays feel expansive. They could be wonderfully funny, surprisingly tender, and occasionally heartbreaking. They were never captions.

They were stories that had been patiently waiting inside the photographs until someone with his imagination discovered them.

He died a year ago.

I still miss him.

Not only because I lost a friend, but because I lost someone who taught me something extraordinary about creativity.

We often imagine that making art is a solitary pursuit. A photographer heads out alone. A writer sits alone at a keyboard. A painter stands alone before a canvas.

Perhaps that’s only where the story begins.

Sometimes the work reaches another creative soul, someone who sees the world differently enough to surprise us, yet similarly enough to understand us. The work becomes an introduction. A conversation begins. A friendship quietly takes root.

Looking back, I don’t think the greatest thing we created together was a book.

I think we created a friendship that neither of us could have imagined when he gathered the courage to send one simple email.

Every now and then, creativity gives us a masterpiece.

Every once in a great while...

...it gives us a friend.

www.roxanneoverton.com