"Telling" a story

<p>Why do photographers, especially experts, always talk about telling a story with the image? Isn't this a faulty use of language?<br />An image can't tell a story. It can show a situation, perhaps even an intriguing situation. The image may evoke that the <em>viewer</em> tells <em>himself </em>(or herself) a story, but it's the viewers story, not the story image tells.<br />I think this misuse of language is most unfortunate. Like when I was an absolute beginner I have always been confused with the concept that I should tell a story with the image. I simply can not. I can perhaps present unusual, even emotional situations, surprising views of landscape, etc. but I can't tell a story with a photo.<br />I expect that due to their insight experts would explain concepts in as precise way as possible. It may not be the precision of mathemathical teorem, but using tricky language is certainly not helping the clarity.</p>

<p>It's a perfectly reasonable term, and a reasonable goal for certain kinds of photography. You're right that the image can present a "situation." But some situations can only come to pass because of a certain string of events, or in the face of of looming (or promising) events. It doesn't matter if the viewer is getting <em>exactly</em> the narrative, down to the invisible pre- or post-shot details. A photograph that doesn't even have the <em>prospects</em> of supporting a narrative will appear lifeless indeed, next to one that does.<br /><br />Of course some of the fun for some photographers is in arming the viewer with the possibilities of a number of stories to explain or expand upon what's seen in the image. For others, especially journalists and social event photographers, cleverly showing hints of the past and the future in the composition and timing of a shot is a sign of real mastery.</p>

<p>as a shooter, the moment you start to think about creating a story, you enter a realm that seperates you from the point and click artistes. a good picture need not tell a story but the most memorable ones tend to. i would say that photograpy with documentary value is perhaps at its best within the street shooting mode. studio created pictures feel a little ariticial to me.</p>

<p>Ales: "I can perhaps <strong>present</strong> unusual, even emotional situations, surprising views of landscape, etc. but I can't tell a story with a photo."</p>

<p>It might be that photographs that tell stories aren't <em>presenting</em> something so much as <em>creating</em> something. Creation often involves the photographer blending something of herself with that bit of the world she is photographing. One of the joys of photographs is that they may open up connections to the world. In this statement, "world" is not the key. "Connections" is. A connection is more than a presentation. It is here that stories begin.</p>

<p>Matt has rightly pointed to narrative. Narrative implies time. Photographs are often mistaken for static because they are reduced by some to "capturing an instant or moment." To be sure, they can do that and do it well. But they can also invoke time.</p>

<p>The viewer may supply a story but the photographer can instigate that and can, in fact, tell a story. How is this done? With photographic tools. Visual suggestions of time. Echoing. Blur suggesting motion in time. The energy of light that moves the viewer's eye around a frame. Symbolism. All of these are tools by which the photographer enables the viewer to make connections to themes and narratives. A good photographer knows the power of associations, knows how to evoke mystery. It is not all done by the viewer, by any means. It is the good photographer who starts and enables that process, through awareness and with intention.</p>

<p>A photographer -- you, for instance -- does not have to tell a story. If you prefer to present objects or situations in the world, why assume others are misusing language when they describe other ways photographs can be used or seen, for instance, to tell stories? I enjoy being open to the various ways in which people create and consider photographs.</p>

<p>This is not about tricky language. It's about vision and understanding.</p>

<p>doesn't <a href="http://www.clintonfein.com/images/pieces/trodd-nick-ut-01.jpg">this</a> tell a story then?</p>

<p>Take off the blinders, of course a picture can tell a story. Hence they often quoted" A picture is worth a 1000 words" Tell me Eddie Adams pulitzer winning execution photo in Vietnam didn't tell a story. Its one of 2 photos that changed American opinion about the war. One of the interesting facts about that still photograph is that the execution was also filmed; the film had a far less powerful effect than the still. Really, I could give you 500 examples, but actually believe this has to be a troll or someone who has not studied photography. My first assignment at RIT was to shoot a narrative still life (translated: a still life that tells a story) Get serious.</p>

<p>I see Ton posted the other shot by Nick Ute that greatly influenced American opinion about the Vietnam war.</p>

<p>Ditto Fred, well expressed your points, and "the power of associations" is very well present in many photo narratives.</p>

<p>No matter what you try to put into a scene, it will almost always kick off the cinema in some spectator's head. That's telling the story.</p>

<p>I agree with all of you (especially with Fred) to some point, but this is not what I had in mind.<br />For example, shot postad by Ton: does it tell a story? By my opinion, no way it can do that. It just presents a situation but it presents it in extremely powerful way. I understand its power as forcing us, the audience, to tell ourself stories, even more, probably everybody tells more or less the same story. It has a powerful message, but is this same as telling a story?<br />Next, refering to John, how could a still photo of the same event be more powerful than film? I don't think that with telling a story since both, photo and film, would tell the same story, if they could. I think that the edge photo may have over film is that the photo is revealing less (but just right) and leaving more to viewers imagination. It makes us, the audience, to give it more thought and time than a film does.<br />Don't get me wrong, I do appreciate powerful photos and I do admire the creative mind and skill that creates them. But I don't like the use of sort of symbolic language that may be confusing.</p>

<p>Ales: so, this is a semantic problem for you, not a photographic one. Think of it this way... can one use a haiku to tell or invoke a story, or must one use an entire novel? It's possible that you're confusing narrative power with documentary detail.</p>

<p><strong>Ales, Perhaps your question can be understood another way:</strong></p>

<p>Your concern about purported "experts" suggests that, even though you know your own photography is worthwhile, you worry about authority figures. Maybe you're being unnecessarily defensive. </p>

<p>False ideas commonly get expressed as "beliefs"- "belief" is used to defend error.</p>

<p>For example,some believe the fairy tale about two famous photos changing America's attitude toward the rape of Vietnam: beloved factual ignorance.</p>

<p>The Eddie Adams and Nick Ut photos have been publicized so much in recent years that they have become icons, wrapped in "belief." But neither photo had anything whatsoever to do with ending the "war." </p>

<p><strong> Eddie Adams' photo dated 1968...after which the war's fever pitch increased. </strong></p>

<p><strong></strong><br>

<strong> Nick Ut's photo dated 1972, AFTER we'd started to withdraw...long after the "silent majority" of Americans</strong><strong> demanded an end to the war (despite Nixon/Kissinger et al).</strong></p>

<p>Matt Lauer's comment on "semantics" is spot on. Exploration of inferred stories can help us share our individual responses to images but those stories aren't the essence of a photo unless a photographer had that intention....that's what I "believe" :-) <br>

</p>

<p> </p>

<p>John--</p>

<p>You seem to be conflating changing attitudes and opinions about the war on the one hand with ending the war or actually effecting political change on the other. That the war's fever pitch increased after 1968 has nothing to do with a photo's affecting people and their opinions in that same year. Perhaps the stories of photos and the attitudes of a populace don't work as immediately as bombs, bullets, and the men who control them.</p>

<p>Ales--</p>

<p>When you say it presents a situation in an extremely powerful way, what do you mean? I assume that powerful situation is not conveyed by magic, right? What gives it power? Does it give you information? Make you think? Provide associations? Does it give you the sense of what came before the moment of capture and what may be about to happen? You ask for precision, so I'll ask you to be precise. What part of story is NOT in the photo Ton referenced?</p>

<p><em>Matt Lauer's comment <br /></em><br />I don't know, John. I think most of Matt <em>Lauer's</em> comments come off a teleprompter!<br /><br />But I'm glad he has that extra vowel, or even more Google-using people would be annoyed by me, even if only in telegenic effigy. Of course, I suppose it's possible that some of my mutterings get confused for his, once in a million web searches... which would be highly amusing.</p>

<p>to echo fred's post above:<br>

<em>"One of the joys of photographs is that they may open up connections to the world. In this statement, "world" is not the key. "Connections" is. A connection is more than a presentation. It is here that stories begin."</em></p>

<p>a twist on sg's; <em>"as a shooter, the moment you start to think about creating a story, you enter a realm that seperates you from the point and click artistes."</em><br>

ime, here and elsewhere on the www, the "telling a story" has become a bit of a cliche, much used by those who seem to despise, and perhaps fear their own connection to, so-called snapshots and p&s clicking. such cliches have a tendency to reduce the meaning of the words..</p>

<p> </p>

<p>Ales,<br>

As a Photographer you should know that a picture is worth a thousand words--as an Artist you should have the imagination to convey these words and marry it to the image. Enough said.</p>

<p>I'll take a stab at that, Fred. That image - <em>by itself</em> - doesn't tell you that napalm was involved, or who deployed it, and whether it was done to stop approaching insurgents and save a village, or to punish a village for being such. So, the image doesn't tell <em>that</em> story, instead it tells the "innocent children are directly caught up in the war" story.</p>

<p>Great post, Matt. </p>

<p>I wasn't suggesting, nor do I think others are, that photos tell the same stories as words or articles. But a story needn't be specific to be told. Just as the details involved in a story like your journalistic one of napalm are not replicated in the photo, the story told by a photo often can't be replicated with words and specific details.</p>

<p>Matt, I chose my words to Ales carefully. I asked "What part of story is NOT in the photo?" You answered what part of <i>the</i> story is NOT in the photo. My question was more universal and generic. And clearly, you seem to recognize that the photo tells a story, though, as you observe, not <i>that</i> story.</p>

<blockquote>

<p>The image may evoke that the <em>viewer</em> tells <em>himself </em> (or herself) a story, but it's the viewers story, not the story image tells.</p>

</blockquote>

<p>Any story could be considered the story the receiver told himself rather than the story told. The medium used to tell the story-- words, photos, paintings, gestures, cartoons-- doesn't change that.</p>

 

<p>Damon--</p>

<p>Thanks for making that important point. For some reason, when it comes to photographs, people often dwell on the role of the viewer and the viewer's interpretation/reaction. It's important to consider that the photographer can have intentions, consciousness, purpose, design, and be a very active participant. That doesn't preclude the fact that a viewer will <em>add</em> his own layers of meaning and emotion. But the viewer is <em>adding</em> and not simply doing whatever he pleases, unless he wants to completely discount the photographer, which would be to discount a lot.</p>

<p>Confusion comes in because we are fond of saying that once a photographer puts her photo up for public consumption, it takes on a life of it's own. Children do that as well as they grow, take on lives of their own. But that doesn't mean parents suddenly become immaterial or irrelevant to who that child will become.</p>

<p>I recall LIFE reporting a photo like this was the most important in terms of reader response:<br>

<a href="http://photosthatchangedtheworld.com/dragging-vietcong-soldier/">http://photosthatchangedtheworld.com/dragging-vietcong-soldier/</a></p>

<p>Fred, you believe the famous Ut and Adams shots had some sort of influence on outcome...</p>

<p>....and you've accepted that there's no chronological linkage between the publishing of the images (68' and 72') and the war's progress . </p>

<p>Television, the press, and popular music were full of strong images of Vietnam. </p>

<p>Soldiers sent uncensored photos home, demonstrated, made presentations in churches. Press photographers were not "embedded," so they shared uncensored death and horror.</p>

<p>IMO Adams and Ut are fatasized to have been influential because the two images are strong and we buy what we're sold about history. But there were thousands of strong images. Every war has images as strong as Ut's and Adams'. </p>

<p>Please explain what the two images had to do with our withdrawl from Vietnam, given that one was made in 68' while we were ramping up and the other in 72' while we were withdrawing. </p>

<p> </p>

<p>Duane Michals ( enigmatic photographic storyteller ) in his book ' Questions Without Answers ' :</p>

<p>"In my sixty-eighth year I have become the lucid dreamer, who has awakened in his sleep of life and knows that he is dreaming. I am a phantom in a phantom landscape. I assume nothing and find the familiar to be a curiosity. The inherited bedrock of definitions which described reality for me is now porous and insubstantial. Has it been sand all along and had I failed to notice? As my consciousness spirals to its pre-destined disappearance, age has forced me to pay attention. Now I begin to see the silhouette of the mystery. I think about thinking and am beyond the comfort of conformity. I must ask questions that I never thought to ask before. The most profound questions seem to be transparent in their ordinariness and deceptive in their significance. A child would understand. I know that this modest enquiry must fail. But what else am I to do?"<br>

<br /><br>

I think the above can be ascribed to the concept of ' story's ', and how at times we can be kept in the dark to what our own story's are, we see no clear beginning, no distinct middle, and no definitive end, for we are the story. We can't go outside the story, and as such, must always interpret story's told by others from inside our own. We percieve by memory, respond by memory. Clarity, the search for it, is futile. Accepting it's futility makes the story clearer.<br>

<br /></p>

<p>The effects of the photo are still being debated. Even the National Review, intent on putting a dent in the romanticized interpretation, recognizes the effect it had.</p>

<p>http://article.nationalreview.com/?q=M2QxNWY0N2ZkY2IxMWJhZGQ4MTU3ZjhlZjg3NTk0NzE=</p>

<p>The National Review article is significant to this thread because it makes clear how viewer interpretation seems to have run amock, straying from the meaning of the photograph and the story it originally captured. Rather than taking the photo as an indictment of General Loan or the war -- the way the anti-war movement and many journalists saw it -- Adams was documenting what General Loan, a man he respected for the many good deeds he had already performed during the war, was brought to upon witnessing the Vietcong man slaughtering several American troops, including wives and children. Though Adams's photo was interpreted as an indictment of Loan, Adams, when he took the photo, had great sympathy and felt much empathy for Loan.</p>

<p>Adams, of course, recognized and always regretted the effect his photo had on Loan's life. From the Review article: "Adams wrote in <em>Time</em> magazine, 'The general killed the Viet Cong; I killed the general with my camera. Still photographs are the most powerful weapon in the world. People believe them, but photographs do lie, even without manipulation.' "</p>

<p>Though it may have been misinterpreted, the National Review article strongly suggests the influence on the public the photo had. The Review article, conservative and pro-war minded as it is, maintains that the interpretation was wrong but recognizes (what it considers to be the unfortunate) the anti-war effects the photo had. Other articles question that influence as you have, John. The matter seems usettled. The influence of the photo is not a fairy tale. It's effect on the American mind set, politicians, and the outcome of the war is still being debated.</p>

<p>A couple of other articles about the debate:</p>

<p>http://www.nytimes.com/2004/09/20/arts/20adam.html</p>

<p>http://www.allbusiness.com/services/business-services-miscellaneous-business/4705682-1.html</p>

<p>The important point for this thread is this:</p>

<p>Ales has said, "The image may evoke that the <em>viewer </em>tells <em>himself </em>(or herself) a story, but it's the viewers story, not the story image tells." This limits itself to the stories (often false and only self-gratifying) that a viewer tells him or herself when viewing a photo. Not to recognize that the photographer is telling a story (one which the viewer might miss, much to the viewer's detriment) is potentially to miss a whole lot of truth.</p>

<p>"Ales has said, "The image may evoke that the <em>viewer </em> tells <em>himself </em> (or herself) a story, but it's the viewers story, not the story image tells." This limits itself to the stories (often false and only self-gratifying) that a viewer tells him or herself when viewing a photo. Not to recognize that the photographer is telling a story (one which the viewer might miss, much to the viewer's detriment) is potentially to miss a whole lot of truth."</p>

<p>Does that mean there is no story except our own story, whether we are the artist or the observer? Are we all missing a "whole lot of truth"?</p>

<p> </p>