SNAPSHOT archive
July to October, they let me work at a newspaper. I don’t remember, now, what it was I imagined they would let me do when I applied for the internship — maybe send some emails, print out pieces of paper, watch them do work and imagine what it would be like to do it myself. In fact, I was given several tasks, and felt busier and far more useful than I had expected to. I checked facts and pitched stories and even conducted an interview — alongside which I also, possibly just out of habit, sent several emails.
Words were a inexhaustible source of discussion at work. The shape of words and how to make them fit on the page, the issue of word choice (is ‘about’ more appropriate than ‘around’? someone would ask, and I’d think: huh), the dilemma of word count, the matter of style. Amongst all these words, however, I was most focused on only 150 of them: the ones I would muster up for the weekly Snapshot.
The Snapshot is a feature of the FT Weekend paper which now appears only in print, on the very last page of the Life & Arts section. It consists of a photograph, taken from a new exhibition or a recently published photo-book, and about 150 accompanying words which provide some explanation of, and insight into, the photograph. For three months, it was my job to write it.
Now, I spent three years at university concocting essays which varied from 2000 to 8000 words in length, about books and what people had written about the books and what I thought about what those people had written about the books. I then spent the last year writing for my own blog, an online space with no editorial pushback and limitless room for rambling. To write words which would go in a newspaper (a physical newspaper, a printed document) was not only shocking because it meant someone other than myself or my tutor or my long-suffering friends would read it, but also because it was as much a negotiation of space as it was an exercise of style. One hundred and fifty words. It was a lesson in brevity, concision, summation (I would not, for example, get away with writing the same thing three times). In many ways, the Snapshot required the inverse of those skills I had enjoyed developing at university and in my blog-writing: I was no longer extrapolating, I was synthesising. I had to produce a kernel of compact writing in which I had distilled my own research about the photograph but which would still feel stylistically satisfactory. A lot of the time, spoiler alert, I did not achieve this — but I had a lot of fun trying.
I’ve compiled all of the Snapshots below (except for one which, because I never managed to get my hands on the paper it was in, is lost to me forever), as an archive mostly for myself, but also for some friends who were curious as to what I have been doing for the last three months. In my opinion, the first few are redundant; it’s not until the Larry Fink Snapshot that I really started getting the hang of it. Other highlights include Luigi Ghirri, Mo Yi and Tina Barney.
When I left the newspaper, people kept asking me what I plan to do next. I would tell them I don’t have a plan, thus impressing them with my crystal clear ambition and career savvy. Whatever I subsequently do, learning how to cut and condense has been a useful exercise which I am still using all the time. In fact, I’m pleased to announce that, after putting it off for three years, I am finally clearing out my wardrobe.
