Now reading Cairn by Kathleen Jamie. Near the end of ‘Prologue’ she says:
‘I was writing again but in a different way, making short pieces, micro-essays, pages, call them what you will. Like the local stone here, they fractured easily. I wrote about incidents, memories, moments that caught my attention. They were distillations and observations. Testimonies. Over a few years they accumulated, and eventually I found myself assembling them into this book. A cairn of sorts.’ 2024 edition, p. 19
I like that model and will use it to help me in a U3AC course I’m about to start. Individual photographs might also be ‘distillations and observations’, micro visual essays.