More Than Words

I didn’t know what to write here until the very last day, when this issue was due to go to press. In the past, I usually had something brewing in my mind months before publication. This time, I just didn’t know what to say. This reminded me why ZOOM’s format emphasizes photography, with very little written content. I am neither a writer nor an avid reader.

I prefer looking at pictures to reading long bodies of text. I remember that as a young student, when I was old enough to visit a bookstore on my own, I would spend hours browsing through photography books. When I “read” books on subjects I find interesting but that are not photography books, I usually skip the text and go straight into the middle section, where photographs are most often grouped together, printed on glossy paper.

When the idea came to me to put together a magazine, it was no surprise that it would be filled with photographs. While I make it a point to have some written narrative accompanying the photo spreads, I leave most of the storytelling to the pictures themselves. I am not even fond of putting captions on the photos! In ZOOM, you are unlikely to find a photo of frost-covered fall leaves with the caption “Frost-covered fall leaves.”

In 1862, Russian author Ivan Turgenev wrote, in Fathers and Sons, “A picture shows me at a glance what it takes dozens of pages of a book to expound.” This is probably the source of that well-known saying, “A picture is worth a thousand words.” Another saying goes, “A picture is a poem without words,” a quote attributed to either Horace or Cornificius and even Confucius.

If you like pictures, then this issue will not disappoint. We have many interesting stories and beautiful poems: the photographs of Shel Neufeld and Paul Hodgson; the art of Morley Baker, Mardi, and Liz de Beer; and the events and activities at the Arts Building and the Sechelt Arts Festival, to name just a few of this issue’s features.

Despite the lack of substance in my writing, I hope you will still enjoy the many photographs that fill the following pages—they express much more than my words can ever say.