words worth a picture: amy hempel

i ran across a passage in The Collected Stories of Amy Hempel tonight that is much more arresting than most of the photographs i've seen lately. (especially since i am one of those people of the mind that photography is closer to writing in many ways than it is to other visual arts...)

enjoy.

"I took one more picture that night. It was after Grey had walked me home. He found a box of photograph corners, the black stick-on kind that frame the picture on the page. He opened up our album, pasted four of them in place.

It was Grey who took the picture; the picture he took was of me. It was candid—I wasn't posed—and the instant, the Polaroid, is what he used. When the blank square of film emerged from the camera, he tore it off and slipped it in the corners on the page, and then he closed the album cover before the image could develop.

That picture is something I lost in the fire."

from the story "Pool Night."