There is, in the creative writing world, a bit of advice given to students, so often it’s become a cliche.
Write What You Know.
This bit of wisdom is offered most often to students who are filled with theory or assumptions but little experience. And, while at first blush, the advice may sound like a limitation, it’s really an invitation to go deep-dive exploring. The advice is not situational or geographic. There is no reason I can’t write about some distant planet or from a point of view that’s not my own (issues of veracity and appropriation still apply!). Instead, the advice is emotional and philosophic.
Write What Your Heart Knows.
“Eyes on Ennetbürgen” by Stephen Smith
Self-published, 2024
Review by W. Scott Olsen

Or, better yet (but not as trippingly off the tongue), go exploring and find the language for the nuances of what you feel is true but cannot easily explain, and then craft that language into a narrative so that others will care and join your quest. The advice is to go exploring in relationships with others, with history and with the land, to write what you discover and come to know.
The advice works just as well for photography. Photograph what your heart knows. Even when the compositional elements might be new to you, or not, the curiosity and desire become your real subjects. Travel photography, abstract photography, ICM, all those things are after an articulation of curiosity and emotional truth.
Of course, sometimes, blessedly, that emotional discovery pairs up with geographic familiarity. There is the knowing of a location and a discovery of that location’s new or changing emotional depth.
The COVID pandemic was a turning point for a great many of us. By limiting us geographically and socially, it asked us to ask an old question in a new way: what do I know? What can I photograph that would be heart and mind-true, if I can’t go exploring with my feet?

Stephen Smith’s new book Eyes on Ennetbürgen, is a wonderful answer to what happens when the world you know is suddenly limited to the world you know. What questions rise?
Eyes on Ennetbürgen has 102 black and white images of the area in and around a small town in Switzerland, and the ship station where twice a day a ferry docks to let off passengers and gather new ones, and where Smith and his partner lived during the pandemic.

This station was a home to friends, and Suzanne Bongers, one of the friends, writes in the introduction,
Views of a village, from a village, of the surrounding world—these are the explorations and moments captured by photographer and musician Stephen Smith in the sprawling village in a breathtakingly beautiful Swiss landscape; explorations undertaken during the pandemic, which made the house, the ship station into a refuge for the photographer. Perhaps the silence of the lockdown sharpened his perception of his surroundings.

In his own afterword, Smith recounts how they came to stay at the house.
In December 2019, my partner Gabriella and I began subletting the seventy-two year old ship station in Ennetbürgen on the Lake of Lucerne in Switzerland. We thought it would be a relaxing weekend retreat and starting point for Gabriella’s kayak excursions.
This happenstance of subletting a house from friends turned into a love affair with the house. Smith and his partner came to know the history of its renovations, and came to love the views of the lake in the water, the sky and the landscape from that vantage point.

He continues,
I could sit on the balcony and stare for hours on end, every moment, every vista, breathtaking. And calming…
Then, boom! Three months later, the pandemic hit. The house became not only an escape, but a true refuge. While the rest of Europe was confined to their tiny urban apartments, we could enjoy seclusion with views stretching for 30 kilometers. It was during this time that I began photographing the village…
Change was happening in the village and had been for a while. The farms were disappearing. There were only two fishermen left. Instead, the residents were now working for the local industries…The wealth was new; a cultural change was underway that increasingly took on a visual aspect for me and made me raise my viewfinder to my eye…Vegetable gardens and grass lawns were giving way to pavement. Instead of tool sheds, two and three car garages were erected. The charming old houses in chalet style were being torn down one by one, replaced by modern apartment houses…
The aesthetics of domesticity and the organization of village life were evolving – progress for some, loss for others. My conflict in documenting these evolutions was that I felt empathetic to both sides.

The city government, owners of the house, decided it should be put on the rental market. Smith and Gabriella thought about becoming the renters, but then decided against it. He writes,
I would make this book instead, as a means of working through the grief of suddenly having to leave this magical place, and as a record of what I loved about it – and what I didn’t understand.

Eyes on Ennetbürgen is an anthology of black and white images from around the small village and lake. If you read Smith’s afterword first, as I did, you know the arc of the narrative. But if you simply start paging through the book without knowing what it’s about, the story becomes quickly apparent and insistent. The book begins with landscape images, suggestive and moving in their evocative tonality. There are mountains and clouds, dramatic skies, mysterious shadows. But then landscape shots quietly become fence lines, houses, garage doors, and the natural world becomes a residential world. Farther in, the residential world gets a little bit more crowded, a little bit more filled. Patina and decay, of the modern sort, creep in. Now there are fences and bars on windows.
The book does return to a more pastoral vision. Not one without humanity, but one where both sides can claim a type of authority.

Smith’s photography is subtle. All the images were shot on film and have that memory feel. Some of the images have a dedication to formal elements of line and shape: garage doors, tree lines, symmetrically arranged plants. Some of the images have a dedication to light and shadow: the mountains and lake and clouds and mist. And there is often a sense of playfulness: garden gnomes or statues of Charlie Chaplain and Mickey Mouse. There are very few people. But all of them, especially when seen as a series, serve a narrative purpose. This book is documentary at one level and a love song at another.
Photograph what you know, especially if it is being lost. You will capture heart as well as head.



A note from FRAMES: Please let us know if you have an upcoming or recently published photography book.