" ... As we sought manuscripts for 'Captured: Writing About Film and Photography,' these questions resonated deeply with the material we collected: How does the lens shape our vision? How does the act of filming affect our behavior? Our writing? How do we represent our ideas about how representations are made, and what, if anything, does this tell us about ourselves as readers? About the (post)modern creative process? And in what ways does the modern writer utilize tropes and familiar trajectories from the worlds of film, movies, photography, and video to express his or her own breadth of view? The literary subjects of this portfolio, varied and surprising in their depictions, range from James Bond to Werner Herzog, from mega-stars to flunky film students, from the wildlife of Los Angeles to refugees and the starlets who fantasize about saving them. The views vary, too, from toilet endoscopies to intimate family photographs to God’s-eye pans. Our contributors play fast and loose with genre, and what was submitted as nonfiction could easily be interpreted as prose poetry or flash fiction. Likewise, screenplay seeps into most everything.

"What we unexpectedly discovered in considering submissions for the portfolio is that writers across all spectra—male, female, established writers and those still emerging—have at one time or another been prompted to write about the experience of watching. And we were a little surprised, as we neared the end of our reading period, to find that so much of that writing is about men watching women, or women looking at themselves. In response, we selected a photo essay that confronts the discomfiting power dynamic between the watcher and the watched head-on: Jessica Dimmock’s "Paparazzi!" follows Hollywood-based photographers in their efforts to hunt celebrities and capture their images for the popular media."