Leah Ollman: Ensnaring the Moment

Leah Ollman: Ensnaring the Moment by Linda AlterwitzNovember 2, 2025

Leah Ollman’s Ensnaring the Moment: On the Intersection of Poetry and Photography (Saint Lucy Books, 2025) is a unique book about photography, presented through a collection of poems written by more than 100 artists spanning from the late 19th century to the present. Within this edited anthology, Ollman challenges how we see photographs by offering an experience shaped through language—one that is deeply bound to photography itself. As Ollman describes, the anthology creates “verbal portals to the visual.”

There is no direct correspondence between the poems and the handful of photographs presented within the book. They are placed within for atmosphere and to allow the text (and the reader) to breathe. Ollman states “While the book is absolutely about photography and the experience of photography, it is not a book of photographs.”

The more than 100 poems gathered here engage with family pictures, news images, found photographs, ordinary scenes, historical events, and more. They speak not only to what is present, but also to what is absent—photographs never taken, or film never exposed.

For me, one poem that truly embodies the duality of presence and absence is Oliver de la Paz’s Boy. Child without Legs. Getting off a Chair. Inspired by Eadweard Muybridge’s 1887 motion study, the poem never directly describes the image. Instead, it grants voice and agency to resilience—illuminating what is visible, what is missing, and what is lost.

Ollman’s introductory essay bridges these two disciplines, offering an avenue to deepen one’s experience. Her words probe the connections between language and light, inviting readers to see a broader picture—one that extends beyond what appears in a photograph—and to understand more than the words within a poem.

“Ensnaring The Moment: Book Reading with Leah Ollman & Rae Armantrout” on Friday, November 7 at 6 PM at the Museum of Contemporary Art San Diego. Details: https://mcasd.org/events/leah-ollman

Ensnaring the Moment: On the intersection of poetry and photography is an anthology of poems from the late 19th-century to the present that reckon with the staggering impact of photographs on our individual and collective consciousness. This first-of-its-kind collection features the work of over 100 poets, including Elizabeth Bishop, Victoria Chang, Lucille Clifton, Nikky Finney, Jack Gilbert, Terrance Hayes, Maxine Kumin, Philip Levine, Ada Limón, W. S. Merwin, Sharon Olds, Adrienne Rich, Wisława Szymborska, James Tate and Ocean Vuong. These poems expand the tradition of ekphrastic poetry, while also serving as unfettered acts of criticism and lyric forays into photo theory. Addressing family pictures, news images, found photographs and more, each poem offers a verbal portal to the visual, where the visual itself is a portal to the past, to an unrecognized facet of the familiar, to the other and to the self.

Leah Ollman is an art historian and critic based in Southern California. She has written about the visual arts for more than thirty years. Her work has appeared in the Los Angeles Times, Art in America, Photograph, The Brooklyn Rail and numerous other publications.

She edited the anthology, Ensnaring the Moment: On the Intersection of Poetry and Photography, published by Saint Lucy Books in 2025.

Books and exhibition catalogues featuring her writing include Klea McKenna: Witness Mark, Betye Saar: Serious Moonlight, Alison Rossiter: Expired Paper, William Kentridge: Weighing…and Wanting, Julie Blackmon: Midwest Materials, The Photographs of John Brill, Michal Chelbin: Strangely Familiar, and Camera as Weapon: Worker Photography Between the Wars.

Saint Lucy Books was established in 2017 by artist and writer Mark Alice Durant. Our first book, Hidden Mother by Laura Larson, was shortlisted for the Aperture / Paris Photo Best First Photobook of the Year. Since then, we have released 16 critically-acclaimed titles. Our books have been featured in The New Yorker, the Los Angeles Review of Books, Aperture, the British Journal of Photography, Lenscratch, Hyperallergic, the Brooklyn Rail, The Guardian, 4Columns, and many other notable publications.

Saint Lucy works on one book at a time; we value collaboration and respect to produce elegant, idiosyncratic, and accessible books that combine words and images to celebrate contemporary photographic artists, and to explore the marginal, hidden, and parallel histories of photography.

The name Lucy derives from the Latin word for light—Lux. Saint Lucy was a young Christian, living in Siracusa Sicily in the third century, who was martyred during the Diocletian Persecution when she refused to marry a pagan nobleman. She suffered numerous tortures for her refusal. One apocryphal version of the story has Saint Lucy taking out her own eyes and offering them to her would-be suitor because he admired them, declaring “Here are my eyes that you desire, now leave me to God.” Saint Lucy is the patron saint of the blind and protector of sight. In devotional images she is most often portrayed holding a golden platter on which her eyes rest. Saint Lucy Books’ logo derives from a 1474 painting by Francesco del Cossa in which a regal Lucy proffers a stem adorned with eyes in place of blossoms. The palm branch in her right hand represents victory over evil. Saint Lucy’s feast day is December 13, which in the Julian calendar was thought to be the longest night of the year. Lucy acknowledges darkness and the coming of light.

Instagram: @saint_lucy_books

Linda Alterwitz is an independent interdisciplinary artist with a focus on photography. Her work homes in on visualizing unseen systems that shape our world, encouraging dialogue around choice, trust, and collective experience. She has been an editor for Lenscratch Magazine since 2015 and is currently the Art + Science editor.

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Tags: Leah Ollman, Photography Book, Poetry