POETRY

Viewfinder is the debut poetry collection by photographer Stephanie Blair Mitchell.

“How do we respond to photographs that have shaped our age? Stephanie Blair Mitchell answers with poems to match their power. Mitchell’s Viewfinder is a stunning achievement, a treasure for all from a beautiful writer, photographer, and soul.”

– Sarah Elizabeth Lewis is an art and cultural historian, John L. Loeb Associate Professor of the Humanities and Associate Professor of African and African American Studies at Harvard University, and founder of Vision & Justice.

Viewfinder traces the early history of photography, showcases her favorite photographers, depicts her personal relationship to the craft, describes the physicality of picture making, and honors her late father who introduced her to the art form. The collection features ekphrastic poems inspired by the photographs of Sally Mann, Emmet Gowin, Dorothea Lange, Margaret Bourke-White, and others who have shaped ways of seeing and remembering.


Published November 14, 2025

Available for purchase through Finishing Line Press, the publisher, or the following:

Harvard Book Store (paperback, hard cover)
Porter Square Books (paperback, hard cover)
Barnes and Noble (paperback, hard cover)
Amazon (paperback, hardcover)

Media

New England Literary News highlights Viewfinder in book feature by Nina MacLaughlin on March 8, 2026:

“Cameras capture / the unutterable,” writes Stephanie Blair Mitchell in her debut poetry collection, Viewfinder (Finishing Line), which pairs her poems with photographs, her own and ones that have defined the times. Mitchell went to Wellesley and studied at the Salt Institute for Documentary Studies in Portland, Maine, and is now the Director of Photography at Harvard. She’s been making photographs since she was ten, taught by her art professor father who had a darkroom in their home. Her poems capture the “small intimacies,” and serve as history lessons, too. There’s a photograph of Jessie Tarbox Beals, the first female photojournalist, high up on a ladder aiming camera at the 1904 St. Louis World’s Fair. We see Dorothea Lange’s famed Migrant Mother (1936) and Eddie Adams’s visceral Saigon Execution (1968), and Gandhi at a spinning wheel by Margaret Bourke-White. Mitchell writes of the frozen moment in photographs, “their stillness / their moment of pause / immortal,” and laments content, engaging instead with images that “shook the course of culture.” Implicit in each poem is the power of photography to alter the world as it captures it. “Moments inspire movements — / History is not changed / by being content.” She’ll be reading from the book tonight, March 8, at the Lizard Lounge in Cambridge. For more information, click here.

Excerpt

View from the Window at Le Gras, c. 1826

Escher sketch
in binary light and shadow

Sun writing
lavender oil and petroleum
on a pewter plate

The first ‘decisive moment’
lasted eight hours

It transpired in 1826
or 1827 —
an odd uncertainty
for a medium
rooted in recording
precise fractions of time

A wash house, a pigeon house
a bake house roof
and an orchard pear tree

The work room window
frames the modest View

Niépce’s original
is eclipsed by Daguerre

For nearly fifty years
it slips into obscurity.



© 2026 Stephanie Blair Mitchell