The one... The only.....Leslie Schultz

Q. Looking at your history you were very involved in literary arts. How did you make a transition to photography and does the literary aspect still have its place in your photography?

It’s less a transition and more of a hyphenation. I am currently working on two novel-length fiction works as well as poetry and essays. But there are connections.

My first art form was poetry, and I used to think that I was a poet because I didn’t know how to be a painter or photographer. My poetry uses the musical quality of language, but it is also highly imagistic. I have a series of poems that are based on paintings and a number based on photographs, especially old family photographs.

As a visual artist, I spent fifteen years playing with fabric, making two dimensional pieces a diverse as quilts, wall-hangings, and mixed-media collages. These evolved into collages of text and photos by others combined with paint on canvas. Then, when I got a digital camera in 2003, I was able to see myself as a photographer. I spent three months photographing a single amaryllis at the same time each morning, watching it go through its changes. From the winter solstice to the vernal equinox I watched this plant bud, flower, and go to seed as the light shifted with the daily weather and the season. After that, there was no turning back: I was a photographer.

“Photography” literally means “writing with light.” As a poet and photographer, words and images are fluid – not quite interchangeable, but closely related, with arresting visual images giving rise to poems and poems coloring how I view the world through my camera lens. Photography helps me see everything around me with more tenderness, noticing beauty where I might otherwise overlook it. I’ve learned that each moment is distinct and unrepeatable. In a split second the light changes, the subject changes, I change.

Read the rest of the interview at www.NorthfieldArtTown.com. Brought to you in part by The Northfield Entertainment Guide.