American Hands project | Sally Wiener Grotta

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My most recent newsletter opens up a discussion about how creativity is contagious. It leaps easily from one person to the next, generating a feedback loop, as well as flows over from one area of our lives to another.

Please read the letter, then respond here on this blog or via email, sharing similar experiences that you’ve had. Once creativity is part of a single aspect of your life does it infect everything else, inspiring you to try novel solutions, or to attempt something that you might not have previously considered possible? What circumstance or person has caused you to catch a particularly fervent case of the creativity bug?

Also in this newsletter are links to an essay about how my photography and writing inform each other, a video and other information about my American Hands portrait project, and an invitation to do guest blogs/essays on this website.

The following is a poem I wrote as part of my ongoing American Hands photo project, in which I am creating narrative portraits of folk who are keeping alive the traditional trades that built our country’s diverse culture.

What is it about the human hand?
Four fingers and an opposable thumb
That can grasp and release
Wield and yield.
But any ape can do that.

No, the human hand,
When it stands alone,
Is not uniquely human.
Only in the connection
Of the hand to the heart and mind
Can we transcend beyond our animal selves.

The hand might grasp and wield
But the mind gives it purpose,
Responding to need with invention and ingenuity.
Thought perceives a void and directs the hand
To fashion and make and change what is.
While the heart reaches for beauty and meaning,
Imbuing our creations with the what could be.