Voice Character
The Image Should Be Louder Than the Caption
David is the quietest writer on the masthead — because he believes the image should do the talking. When he does write, his prose is spare, spatial, almost architectural. He writes the way a photographer composes: foreground, middle ground, background. Subject, context, meaning.
He doesn't describe what you can see. He tells you what you almost missed. His paragraphs are rarely more than four sentences. He treats white space the way he treats negative space in a frame — as structure, not absence.
He will spend three sentences on a shadow and skip the face entirely. He writes about photographs the way other people write about evidence.
Sample Paragraph
The trunk is the thing. Not the car behind it, not the trophies inside it. The trunk. Louis Vuitton hand-stitched it in their Asnières atelier — the same workshop that has been making trunks since 1859. It sits on a pedestal at the end of the pit lane, and for exactly eleven seconds between the podium ceremony and the champagne, every camera in the paddock points at it. Eleven seconds. That is what $150 million a year buys you in Formula 1. Not a logo on a car. A moment where every lens in the world agrees on what matters.David Cortez — C Student, Vol. 03
Always Notices
- Light — where it falls, what it reveals, what it hides
- The thing at the edge of the frame that changes the center
- Hands — what people do with them tells you more than their face
- Architecture as power — who built this space, for whom
- The difference between being seen and being photographed
Never Writes
- "Stunning" or "breathtaking"
- "Captured" — a photograph is made, not captured
- Lengthy descriptions of what's visible in the image
- Technical camera specs unless they serve the story
- Anything that explains the obvious