Ekphrastic Prompt 5: In Your Own Background

'Landscape with the Fall of Icarus', Bruegel

One of the most famous poems which responds to a work of art is Auden's 'Musee des Beaux Arts', which famously zooms in on and out from the figure of Icarus falling to his death in Pieter Bruegel the Elder's 1558 'Landscape with the Fall of Icarus'. Icarus is a tiny figure, and Bruegel's genius is in the way in which this strange death is situated in the 'everydayness' of a C16th landscape, where, in Auden's words

...the expensive delicate ship that must have seen
Something amazing, a boy falling out of the sky,
Had somewhere to get to and sailed calmly on.

This made me think of other pictures by Bruegel - those crowd scenes where all those ordinary people must also have their stories that no one else knows or cares about. And paintings by other artists: the people in background of Ford Madox Brown's 'The Last of England', or the followers in Gozzoli's Procession of the Magi, a picture full of ordinary people who are not the main focus of the image.

Gozzoli's 'Procession of the Magi'

But today's prompt does not use a painting by a famous artist. It uses an image created by you.

Most people take photos - if you are anything like me, you take quite a lot! And when you are on holiday, focussing your camera on a building, or a church, or your child playing on the beach, you quite often take pictures which contain people you don't know. Have a look at your holiday snaps; find one with strangers in it. If it's a digital photo on your computer, zoom in on someone. If it's not digital, you'll just have to make your eyes work a bit harder. Is there someone there who looks out of place? Someone whose expression hides something? That's your springboard, your Icarus. Write about that person, that crowd, that location. Write about your relationship with that person - because you have one now, now that you've noticed them. Or think of it another way - what if you were the stranger in someone else's holiday snaps?

So this prompt is a kind of echoing ekphrasis, springboarding you, as writer, off the Auden/Breugel motif of people unaware or uninterested in what is happening in the background to their lives, to find the people you didn't notice in a day in your own life. Could be interesting!


With thanks to Sally Flint, whose suggestion to write a poem from an image of someone you don't know led me to this idea. 


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