Silver Eye Center for Photography

Point of View Writing Workshops

The Point of View Writing Workshops are a collaboration between Silver Eye and Sherrie Flick, artistic director of the Gist Street Readings series (www.giststreet.org). These writing workshops introduce a new way of looking at and responding to photography. Through a series of generative writing exercises, participants construct short stories related to the gallery’s current photography exhibition. In this way, Silver Eye hopes to foster a dialogue between Pittsburgh’s writing community and its gallery space with this two-year audience participation project. This project was funded through the Arts Experience Initiative of The Heinz Endowments. Click here to learn about upcoming program dates.

Click here to read an article about Point of View from the Pittsburgh Tribune-Review

The following is a selection from the previous exhibitions that have been used as source material for an extension of the Point of View workshops. Silver Eye has commissioned five Pittsburgh writers to respond creatively to upcoming exhibitions. Sherrie Flick is curating these poets and prose writers, whose work will be posted on this web site and who will participate in one of two upcoming public readings. The exhibition is used as a jumping off point. Sometimes the work is directly related to the image in the photograph, to its details. Other times, it’s the mood or the tone that helps writers connect to the image.

Process reports from the authors:

"You'd think you could consume a two-room gallery like Silver Eye in your first 20 minutes. But six Saturdays later, looking up from your notebook where words have piled on inexhaustible words, you see the same photographs with new eyes and it clicks: the idea you'd been missing to make it cohere. The giant stone next to the tiny little eggs makes you laugh out loud, and suddenly, your character is making a big deal out of nothing."

–David Seals

Full Piece

"The nature theme of this gallery made me feel instantly at home. The passenger pigeon photo caught my eye because, coincidently, I was just telling someone the tragic story of the passenger pigeon earlier that week. And then, there was this photo; stark and simple. It made me think about needs. How humans needed this bird to the point of their extinction, and how, now, we still need them to serve as an icon."

–Kelle Gomola

Full Piece

"After seeing the exhibit a few times and attending Graham’s artist talk, I explored my daily world looking for what I thought of as ‘soft spectacles’— people who aren’t purposely calling attention to themselves but whose actions do. My goal was to craft images as objectively as I could while still capturing the dissonance inherent in the situation. I hope to honor my subjects with some sense of poetic beauty while offering up their American daily-life ‘spectacle-ness’ for others to see."

– Nancy Krygowski

Full Piece

Ohio Grass

Rosamund Purcell has an obsession with rotundity. A red bowl on the counter, a beach ball in the yard, the side of a breast on TV. The fat woman’s elbow at the grocery store, with its swirling divot hanging from a flower print sleeve. The eyeballs of her mother, whose lips always move so rapidly. The concentric circles around three hole punches on her fifth grade English notes. And so it is that Rosamund Purcell becomes a photographer of eggs.

“Miss Rosy, I do believe you’ve grown a whole size since I saw you last!” The world smells of leather, and the salesman’s bald head shines while he slides the silver knob up her sock, stopping at the ball of her foot. He fidgets, and the conical glare dances. Rosamund reaches into her bag, but the sheen is gone, replaced by his face. “Kid’s eleven!” he declares and bustles into the store room. In the bag, she finds the pink plastic camera, and flips the switch to “on.” He returns. “Just one more year, and you’ll be wearing a women’s shoe!” Rosamund smiles and thinks, “Put your head down.” On his knees, he pulls a wad of paper from the kids’ eleven and slips the sneaker onto her foot. Lacing and bobbing, lacing and bobbing, the circle bounces like a lottery ball. Her palms sweat. Her throat dries up. Her hands clench the camera. Her mother will kill her. There is no going back. “I’ve got you,” she whispers.

The old toy box creaks under her tiptoes, its wood slats bending as she arches her body up to the basement window. Tense and taught she pauses, listening for a sign that someone has awakened. Nothing. Fourteen, and she is really too old for this. Gently she finds the tiny tab at the window ledge, popping the screen from its track. The window slides open. Crickets. With a heave, she topples onto the dewy mulch. Rosamund brushes off her blue jeans, and moonlight floods the first hours of Easter. She exhales and remembers what this used to feel like. “I will find you,” she whispers to the yard.

At the center of the studio, the table bends under the weight of curling nests and cardboard cartons of speckled ovals. Tipped from their perches, stuffed birds stare out of glass eyeballs. Light drizzles down from umbrellas on tripods, arcing to where Rosamund kneels alone, barefoot, over a giant stone egg. “You say you’re in love, Jon,” she thinks, “but you won’t understand the enormity of what’s coming.” The concrete is cold. Flip-flops in the corner, women’s eight. She traces a crack with her toe. The room is filled with corners, boxes, a crowbar. Rosamund rises to her feet, the camera strap tight to her neck, and begins to pry open a wooden crate. Splintering boards then packing bubbles then a humming metal box then the smallest living egg she’s ever seen. Gingerly, she cups it in warm hands and walks to the still life, placing it atop the giant stone. “There,” she says with a decisive click. “I dedicate this piece to Jonathan Lanyan.”

His bow tie is too loose, as are his tuxedo pants, and he tries his best to flatten the curling name tag on the grosgrain lapels. “You look great, Jon,” she says over her shoulder, walking across the gallery floor to her mother. “Really, you do.” He nods, unconvinced, and throws back his glass of wine. Jonathan Lanyan scans the black frames and knows the painstaking secrets inside every one of those eggs. The freckled pair embarrassed on the burlap. The plastic dozen exposed on green felt. The snow-covered trio buried in their nest. The titles are smokescreens, he thinks, and when the people who own their tuxedos get there, they will read Long-tailed Manakin Eggs with no idea about a camera lying idly on a blanket in the summertime Ohio grass.

David Seals holds a BA in English Literature and Spanish from Grove City College. He serves as Programs Manager for the Greater Pittsburgh Arts Council, where he contributes features to Update and Visit Pittsburgh's Play Magazine.

dead bird perched on a branch of the past

In their journals, early European explorers marveled at the sight of your flocks, so numerous that the light of day was shadowed by your winged migration.

You once formed your own eclipse across the limitless sky of modernity.

You were the meat that fed the slaves that built this country.

And now look at you.

You stand strong, poised and posed by your hunters, whose need for you did not die alongside your breed.

Now you’re needed to symbolize the carelessness that can accompany efficiency.

You are the job that I can’t get because they can make it cheaper in China.

We sit, fat and sour on the land we needed, cloaked in the superiority we needed, stupidly grabbing for more more more of everything in sight.

We sit, our belly’s growing, looking around the Land of the Free For the Taking

convincing ourselves that life begins and ends through an electrical outlet.

Kellee Gomola is a recent graduate of Slippery Rock University's Professional Writing program. She has spent seven years working in and studying the environment.

In Search of America #1

There’s nothing stupid

about the Liberace Fan Club,

nothing stupid about loving

what you love.

An unlit candelabrum

raised in a glittery toast

to one man’s artifice. Tell me—

what can be more beautiful

than this?

Nancy Krygowski's book of poems, Velocity, won the 2006 Agnes Lynch Starrett Poetry Prize from the University of Pittsburgh Press. She's received grants from the PA Council on the Arts and from the Pittsburgh Foundation, plus residencies at the Jentel Foundation and The Kimmel Nelson Harding Center for the Arts. She works as an adult literacy instructor.