This Visible Speaking: Catching Light through the Camera’s Eye Note: The Humble Essayist Press and I are happy to announce that the paperback is now available through the Lulu Bookstore.

An Ekphrastic Book of Photography, Poetry, and Prose Based on the River and Mountain Meadow Landscapes of Colorado.

This Visible Speaking creates a gorgeous polyphony of photographs, lyric meditations, and the voices of photographers. Image and text mirror each other, enacting the ways that the world of nature outside us can evoke and mirror our inner human life—our visions, loves, our losses. Like Georgia O’Keefe, Winograd says of her photos and forays into the wild, “I found I could say things with color and shapes that I couldn’t say any other way—things I had no words for.” Emily Dickinson writes of how “A light exists in spring” that “almost speaks to you”; in Winograd’s book, it finally does. This is a book to hold close, to travel with—and return to—for a very long time. —Angie Estes, author of Parole

Kathy Winograd’s This Visible Speaking is a gorgeous foray into the splendors of her Colorado landscape, particularly the wildlife near and around the South Platte River. The beauty of snowy egrets, young flickers, cormorants, red-tailed hawks and other animals and growth caught in Winograd’s camera-eye become astonishments. An essayist and poet Winograd’s photographs of visual speaking are enriched by her lyrical conversations with the likes of Man Ray, Edward Weston, Paul Strand, and writers from Dante to Baudelaire, Poe, and Barthes. Like those artists she converses with, it is the transformative power of the visual, particularly when in dialogue with the textual, that rivets her. Having been gifted a camera during the Covid pandemic Winograd finds herself on a quest “looking for some kind of prayer” in what she describes as “translations of light” – a magic, her camera and poetry have so luminously gifted us.

—Adrianne Kalfopoulou, author of On The Gaze and Ruin.

This Visible Speaking’s lyrical prose conjures evocative images, its observant pictures invite thoughtful reading, and its attention to others’ contemplations of both the visual and the poetic enrich each section. The reader soon engages with the visible speaking as intensely and as intricately as the author has.
  —Robert Root, author of Happenstance

Out of the ash of grief and loss that COVID left behind for so many of us, Kathryn Winograd has assembled an astonishing book of prose and photographs. “I was looking for anything like prayer,” she writes in her preface, “anything like visible parlare to bring back even a moment of peace, just a small quiet joy” and she has done more than that. She has caught “light through the camera’s eye” and in every photograph is some shard of natural beauty from this fragile and resilient world that held us through a pandemic and holds us still. Her patient, quiet eye brings us fox, heron, owl, kestrel, painted turtles, butterflies, shells, orchids, and so much more. Kathryn Winograd’s This Visible Speaking is a book with essays that honor and love the natural world—its birds and creatures, its fruits and flowers—and her book pays homage to other photographers and writers who share this holy regard. If praise is a form of prayer and prayer is a form of love, then these words and photographs are a love letter, touched by sadness and deep concern for the planet, yes, but not without a scintillating thread of hope for “what blossoms, what speaks.”

—Lisa Zimmerman, author of Light at the Edge of Everything