Stories of Listening: Seoyu & Sara (age 6 & age 5)
Captured by Deb Wilenksi
Language of Micro-Portraiture
Seoyu arrived from South Korea in our final semester and was new to English. By her second week of school she had made connections with children that showed her love of tiny things, her humour, and a desire to be in active, playful conversations. Sara, who began the year as the only Italian speaker, had become Seoyu’s closest friend. We were together in the forest making a micro-land in the holes of a fallen tree. Seoyu spotted a tiny hole in a piece of bark and looked through it at me. She handed it to me and I looked back at her.
I remembered a series of photographs my daughter had taken this way and quickly used my phone to try it out. It worked! Seoyu held a leaf with a hole to the phone camera and used it to take the first micro-portrait of Sunyoung, the only other Korean speaker in our classes. After several shots Seoyu took the phone and went to find others to photograph in this new language of visual contact and playful invitation. My personal history as a silent child framed how I heard Seoyu’s image-based language. Being silent does not mean you are not talking internally. Seoyu’s language of micro-portraiture is so meaningful to me because until she arrived I did not speak it. I had the beautiful privilege of hearing the first words.
MICRO-PORTRAITURE: seeking, finding, laughing, capturing, escaping, continuing, framing, playing.