The Power of a One-Minute Story
Visual artist-turned-writer Daniel Troppy talks about chronicling his parents' end-of-life journey, 100 words (and one image) at a time
Atlanta-based artist Daniel Troppy had always worked in visual media: painting, photography, and sculptures from found objects. But after the death of his brother, Darrell Troppy—a painter in Beaumont, Texas, whose work was shown in New York galleries and The Louvre—Daniel found himself turning to words.
“When my brother passed away, that’s when I started to write,” he told me. “And I am not a writer. I wasn’t an artist with words. But writing saved me.”
In grief, he found catharsis in writing tiny true stories—defining moments, memories, micro-narratives—each paired with a black-and-white photograph with the mood and grain of film. Written with telling detail and brevity, the stories averaged 100 words. A minute or less of reading.
“I just started to write these little stories,” he said. “I Iiked how I felt after I purged them from my memory and my body. I discovered that writing was the best form of therapy.”
His project, eventually titled “Good Mourning,” evolved as he began taking care of his aging parents. Immersed in their world, he documented the last phase of their lives with a caregiver’s heart and an artist’s eye. The story unfolds on an Instagram feed that looks more like a black-and-white contact print. (It’s also on Facebook and Daniel’s website.)
As a friend and a distant observer, I was captivated. His images were arresting, more concerned with a mood and a moment than technical precision. His writing used specificity of detail to avoid cliché. He precluded tropes and stereotypes by focusing on individuals. This was something remarkable. But what was it? Was this journalism? Art? Documentary? Visual memoir? A serial narrative unfolding in real time?
“They’re love letters,” Daniel said. “Each story captures a small moment in time. A visit. A question. A memory. A feeling. I wanted to use my photography skills and write these short stories to document my parents’ end-of-life journey.”
Amid the selfies and cats of Instagram, Daniel’s silver gelatin prints stood out: An empty swing set that reminded me of William Eggleston’s untitled Memphis tricycle. An old woman pushing a walker through a hallway lined with portraits. A wrinkled hand with an IV line. Thinning hair in curlers.
The writing knocked me out with tender specificities: She once had a full head of hair. Thick, luscious, jet-black wavy hair, so thick you could hardly run a brush through it. Today, her head of hair tells another story. She strategically tries to conceal her balding spot by brushing the front hair straight to the back. Today, a brush easily glides through her hair, reminding her of her vanished youth. Mom will turn ninety in two months, so her battlefield is littered with carnage.
It was all so raw and intimate. It made me slightly uncomfortable, but also moved me. Brave and unflinching, Daniel pressed the shutter in moments that might have caused me to look away. They pulled me into a world I felt I shouldn’t be privileged to see, like Sally Mann’s family portraits. There was a touch of documentary, a la Walker Evans’ Let Us Now Praise Famous Men, but this photographer wasn’t an outsider. He was part of the scene, invisible but present. Shooting not only with permission, but love.
What was going on here? I had to learn the story behind these stories. So I gave my friend Daniel a call.
The Backstory
I first met Daniel 12 years ago in Atlanta, where he owned a designer consignment shop called Doubletake. I was a new author with style anxiety about my upcoming book tour. Daniel gave me an extreme makeover, dressing me in vintage Celine, Oscar de la Renta, and Prada, stretching my $500 wardrobe budget at the cost of his bottom line. We kept in touch through Instagram and text conversations that often began with a photo and an urgent question: Which dress? What shoes?! Does this work?!
In 2015, Daniel closed the shop and took up analog photography, learning to process 35 mm film and develop prints in a darkroom he set up at home. His Instagram feed transformed into a series of black-and-white portraits and profiles of people in Atlanta. None of them lived under a roof. But his subject wasn’t homelessness. It was people. Individuals.
With permission, he took each person’s photo, interviewed them, and shared their story in the Instagram caption. His images and words convey a genuine connection. As the individual vignettes amassed, they comprised a bigger mosaic, a portrait of a community of people living on the streets. Daniel wasn’t a journalist, but what he was doing looked a lot like it. He put a human face on a problem. He told their individual stories. That made it harder to look away.
People started to send him money to help the people they saw in the photos. So Daniel created a non-profit called YIMBY Georgia (short for Yes In My Back Yard) to distribute backpacks filled with toiletries and home cooked meals in biodegradable containers.
On Christmas morning in 2021, Daniel got a phone call. His brother, at work in his studio in Texas, had died of a heart attack. The grief drove Daniel to writing. Stories poured out as fast as he could scribble them in a little black notebook. Not long after his brother died, Daniel became a caregiver for his elderly parents, who lived in the Rio Grand Valley, about 20 miles from the border. He flew to Texas for weeks at a time. Sometimes weeks turned into months.
Two themes in his life began braiding together: aging parents in Texas and people on the streets in Georgia. Sometimes his stories would correspond with the photo. Other times, they didn’t. “That’s deliberate,” Daniel said. “I was never the type of person who wanted the sofa to match the painting behind it.”
Instagram, Twitter, and Facebook became his gallery. He curated photographs—some old, some new—to pair with the stories. These were not iPhone photos, but silver gelatin prints he made by hand in a darkroom. Once dry, he laid the prints on a table and digitized them with his iPhone. On Instagram, you can tell they are prints by the asymmetrical border and curl of the corners.
To him, this was art, not journalism. But there were elements of memoir, autobiography, and longform immersive journalism. The constraints—one image, one minute of reading—were a deliberate creative conceit, and also a nod to his brother.
“He had such bad ADHD,” Daniel said. “So I wrote stories that could be read in a minute or less. That was a way for me to pay homage to him.”
The Fine Line
As a writer, I want my stories to not make readers not only think, but feel. And Daniel’s photos stirred me up with complicated emotions. I admired his courage for documenting not only the tender moments but the messy indignities of aging. He did it in a way that was honest, but also respectful to his mother.
Last year, when my mother’s Alzheimer’s made it unsafe for her to live alone, she moved in with me and my family, and I became her caregiver. There were moments I felt compelled to document, but I struggled with that impulse. I didn’t want to exploit her vulnerable condition, which she found embarrassing and humiliating. But I also knew our story could help someone feel less alone. That’s one of the reasons I write.
When mom got violent with me one night, I took out my phone and filmed it, planning to show her Mr. Hyde moments to her Dr. Jeklyll self. (I didn’t.) When she covered the ceiling and three walls with chocolate milk, I documented the comical carnage, so we could laugh about it later. (We did.)
When a horrific phone call summoned me to the hospital, I took photos of her body on life support. The last time I saw her face in the crematorium, I took three death portraits. Writing this publicly fills me with guilt and shame. But it was something I had to document, or else I would regret it. I may never show any of this to anyone, but I need it for myself.
My impulse to document awful moments is rooted in my fear of losing my memory. My mother’s mother had dementia, too, so the genetic odds terrify me. I also know that when I’m ready to write about this—probably years from now—I will want to fact-check my memory, as I have always done when I write memoir. (A student once asked me where the dialogue came from in The King of Tides. I pulled out a notebook and showed her.)
Writing about intense emotions is like mincing through a minefield of cliches. The best way to avoid them is hyper-specificity. Capturing the universal through the particulars. The Ladder of Abstraction is a wonderful tool for this. Stay low, in the realm of concrete imagery and telling detail, and you’ll immerse the reader in a cinematic scene and maybe even stir their emotions.
Daniel did this well. He wrote about moments I related to, though his details were unique. He portrayed the awkward dance of pride and humility the first time he bathed his mother. He wrote about taking her for long drives, and how she’d ask him to turn down a particular dirt road that she’d never travelled before. He confessed his well-meaning folly of making her superfood smoothies, only to learn, explosively, that her 89-year-old body couldn’t tolerate that much fiber.
Many of his micro-stories have all the key narrative elements: dialogue, scene, character, tension, point of view, and an arc. Some are more like pencil-studies an artist sketches before committing to a painting. Collectively, they comprise a longform story that evolves over time.
The Long Arc
As time passed, and his mother’s health declined, Daniel’s caregiving duties expanded. He had to make a choice: Run his nonprofit or care for his parents. He couldn’t be in two places at once. He chose to care for his parents.
This also meant he no longer had the time and energy to develop film and make prints in a darkroom. To keep the project going, he needed the speed and ease of digital photography. He didn’t buy a digital SLR. He figured out how to make his iPhone produce images like film.
In his Instagram project, you can see a shift in the fall of 2024. The border and curl of physical prints disappears. The images lose much of the blur and grain.
Yet the collection retains a sense of visual continuity. Some viewers might not notice the shift from film to digital. Some of the iPhone images suggest the blur of camera shake, the warp of a tilt-shift lens, or the high-contrast grain of Tri-X film. Some project the weight of daguerreotypes.
How did he do that? He shared some tricks. For this shot, he smeared Vaseline on a plate of glass, then holding the glass against his iPhone lens—a DIY filter. This stylized blur in this photo comes from shooting though a screened door. For the pinhole camera effect of this image, he curled his hand into a circle and shot through it.
After he shuttered his nonprofit, Daniel archived most of the portraits of the homeless community. The collection centers his family, plus occasional portraits of other people, and some Egglestonian vignettes (without the vivid color).
Now five years into the project, he has amassed more than 650 stories. He’s still caring for his 93-year-old father, and he will continue until the inevitable end. Daniel envisions the end of the story: when his parent’s Texas house is sold, and he walks away for the very last time. His dream is to find an agent and publish the project in book form, though the emphasis is more on the writing than the photos.
“I didn’t just write 655 short stories,” Daniel said. “I’m documenting a lived experience. I view them as love letters for my parents.”
How did his parents feel about this? Did he tell them about it? Or show them?
“You know, I did,” he said. “I showed them one evening, and we spent two hours at the dining room table. I read them the stories. They looked at the photographs. They cried at some and they laughed at others. And my dad put his hand on my shoulder, and he said, ‘That would make a great book.’”
For other examples of short-form narrative storytelling, subscribe to the Nieman Storyboard newsletter. I was asked to guest-edit next Friday’s newsletter, in which you’ll find links to my favorite narrative song and other examples of storytellers using Instagram as a platform for short-form stories.
Other Storyboard resources for narrative writers:
Daniel’s stories and accompanying photographs are powerful, beautiful and sometimes heartbreaking.
Thank you for so beautifully highlighting our friend’s immense creativity and even bigger heart.