This Visible Speaking: Catching Light Through The Camera’s Eye

Dante called the most beautiful things of this world the visible parlare- the visible speaking- that comes not from our hands but God’s. The surprise gift of a camera during Covid lockdown casts Kathryn Winograd on a journey through the intersections between written and visual images. Mourning what feels like the broken world, she moves between the quaking aspen of her Teller County cabin and the South Platte River near her suburban home in search of the beautiful things of this world that might speak to us: the imprint of a dead flicker, the shell of a moon snail on a window sill, or taking a puppy outside at 3 a.m. to pee and contemplating the universe. In this exquisite hybrid collection of photopoetry and prose vignettes, Winograd weaves together images of the Colorado she loves, whether wandering bull elks or cabbage white butterflies. The images in This Visible Speaking give rise to meditations on love and loss and beauty and on the voices of those early explorers of the daguerreotype and the photograph who, dazzled and wary, learned to fix the world in light.