Can a single photo tell a story?

[kuuan]

Very well said RichC

the story perceived depends on individual perception, prior personal experience, ideas, concepts, and is created in one's head.

sjones as child, looking at the photo of the assassination, you did not have any prior knowledge or ideas that would have made you perceive 'your' or any story. Your linked article recounts that the photo had told a very different story than the photographer had wanted to tell. It only proves that the stories an image tells are based on priory existing ideas on part of the viewers and that those easily can overpower facts, reality as perceived by the photographer or what had been the intention of presentation.

Therefore, since Vietnam, images out of war zones that make it into news, are highly censored and controlled. Remember the footage of the first Iraq war, they rather looked like one big continuous commercial for US weapons, not like actual war, no blood nor dead bodies. Or the earlier 'proves' of the presence of weapons of mass destruction.

News are presented as facts but actually are designed, at best distorted to make us believe a premeditated message. Images are 'embedded', it's too dangerous to let them speak by themselves, and most carefully censored to be used as powerful back ups and 'proves'

in politically not sensitive news and presentations facts get distorted simply to sell better.

 

[Addy101]

But without further explanation, the photo by itself requires the viewer to already possess a certain understanding of the event, lest they otherwise be oblivious as to what exactly has just taken place.

This is powerful reasoning, but in the end it is a seriously flawed one. Because in photo's aren't any different from other forms of communication: they're all based on prior knowledge - about reading, about content, about history or about current affairs. Somebody posted an interview with Winogrand: that interview is only relevant if you have prior knowledge about the importance of Winogrand.

It is impossible to tell everything in the world in a written story, it relies on the reader to have prior knowledge and some imagination. If prior knowledge is excluded, it is impossible to tell a story at all.

As philosophers like Wittgenstein and Foucault tell us, language (communication) doesn't exist in isolation, but always in context. Pictures also have meaning in context. Can a short story tell a story? Yes it can. Can a photo tell a story? Yes is can.

So, I agree with RichC 🙂

 

[airfrogusmc]

I guess the bigger question is why do people think it's important for a single photograph to tell a story and why do they put prejudgements on the quality of an image based on whether it does?

Stories are for documentary projects with things like forewords and artist statements.

In new articles there are always captions or articles with words (narrative).

So why can't great photographs ask questions, create dialog, make you think? Great photographs do that. Leave the story telling to others mediums and art forms that really do that well. Written word and movies do it well. Let photograph do what it does better than any other art form which is freeze moments in time.

 

[RichC]

I guess the bigger question is why do people think it's important for a single photograph to tell a story and why do they put prejudgements on the quality of an image based on whether it does?

Stories are for documentary projects with things like forewords and artist statements.

In new articles there are always captions or articles with words (narrative).

So why can't great photographs ask questions, create dialog, make you think? Great photographs do that. Leave the story telling to others mediums and art forms that really do that well. Written word and movies do it well. Let photograph do what it does better than any other art form which is freeze moments in time.

That's all fine. It's up to individuals whether they're interested in photographs as documents - as evidence that an event happened - or in the narratives that spool off photographs. If you don't care about the stories told by photographs - well, you don't have to. Entirely your choice - and no one can damn you for that!

I'm simply objecting to those folk who say that photos don't tell stories: because they do!

What makes photographs unique is that they are objects that act as evidence while at the same time telling a story. Which aspect is to the fore is dependent on a particular photograph and a specific viewer.

However, disregarding photographs that fail to play to the strength of the medium - freezing time to record past events - is a slippery slope. In the 20th century, the art establishment went up its own arse in large part from this kind of thinking. Take painting: it's a two-dimensional medium (i.e. flat) so abstract painting was promoted to the detriment of figurative art (i.e. art bearing a close likeness to the subject portrayed) because representational art is better suited to three-dimensional mediums like sculpture. The world we inhabit is not flat, so using a flat medium to create likenesses of real people and objects and using techniques like perspective was considered not to be letting painting "do what it does better than any other art form"(your words!).

Thankfully, the art world came to its senses towards the end of the 20th century! Today, it's no longer considered bad form to "contaminate" paintings with things that other mediums do "better" - such as representation or story-telling. Some people give their paintings very unusual properties, like smells, sound and movement!

And it's the same with photography. Yes, it has its strengths and unique qualities - but there's nothing wrong with "mixing it up" with aspects more usually associated with other mediums. In galleries, for example, it's now common to find headphones so you can listen to sound when looking at a photograph. And there's the meteoric rise of the photobook over the past decade.

I've got a photographic project in the pipeline in which the gallery where my photographs will be seen will have a very particular and distinctive smell!

 

[airfrogusmc]

Good luck with your exhibit and a series or a documentary project or body of work in many cases do tell stories but a single photograph on its own without words is as Winograd eloquently said in the piece I posted.

Also if read what i said it is what photographs do best not that people had to photograph like that. Mixed media is fascinating but when you start doing those kinds of things to help communicate an idea then it's not just the single photograph achieving that end result it is the other things that are added to help tell a story like words or a video stream or other mediums applied like oder. Once you add those things like words, Duane Michals comes immediately to mind, it is no longer just a single photograph and if the single photograph could do that then why would one need to do a documentary series, add words like captions, forewords or artists statements?

 

[gns]

Are we ever objective observers? When we observe something (anything) aren’t we always imposing on it all of our previous experience, knowledge, etc? Whether it is a novel, a picture, a chair or a fish, isn’t our understanding of it partly a result of what we bring to it?

But the fact that I bring my own experience to a James Cain novel, and that I also bring my own experience to a Winogrand photograph, doesn’t make the photograph a story. In Double Indemnity, there is a sequence of events (what happened). I may add to that my own experience, but there is some story there in the first place. The novel IS (in part) a story. In a photo there is no explanation of what happened, just some description of how things looked at a given moment. It certainly may evoke a story in me, but it is not a story itself. Telling a story is a different thing from suggesting or evoking one.

Much of the mystery and charm of photography is that it gives us so much yet so little. An abundance of descriptive detail, but nothing of what happened. The best ones often seem to play on this and prompt us to question what happened but they don’t tell us.

Gary

 

[Hsg]

The first time I saw the landscape work of Ansel Adams, I was really impressed, they really impacted me, but then many years later and a lot of learning and I begun to think that Ansel Adams was just a landscape shooter - I begun to think that his photos were simple and nothing special... I thought HCB was the real deal and decisive moment shots required more skill...

This 'learning', which is inevitable once you get into photography can really skew one's ideas and in fact destroys that freshness of perspective of the beginner.


This is one of the reasons that now I see no reason to jump into conclusions about photography... Winogrand was a smart guy and he said some interesting things about photography... Just because he said some interesting things it does not mean he was correct... But then again what Winogrand said was always more interesting than his photos - imho.


All theoretical knowledge of photography only helps to ruin photography because photography is not something theoretical, you go out and take photos, if there is something in those photos, without over-cooking them, then good enough otherwise go again and take some more photos until you finally reach somewhere.

 

[airfrogusmc]

No it doesn't mean it is correct because Winogrand said it.

I don't know about a lot of things. I don't know a lot about physics and string theory. I do know a little about photography and everything i have learned has brought me to the same conclusion as Winogrand.

And there are probably not many that post here that take more images than I do. It is my livelihood, my profession. It is my passion, hobby and entire life. I have studied, taught it and had success with both my commercial work and my personal work.

If you take preconceived ideas like looking for a photograph to tell a story or preconceived ideas of what a photograph should look like it is freeing. Try it sometime....

Also the more I learned about photography and the more I learned about the zone system the more I admired Adams work and his approach to the medium. And just because I prefer the work of Bresson doesn't mean I don't recognize the work of Adams as being great too. In fact their approach to the medium and their ideas about the moment were not that different.

 

[BenJT]

Yes, someone might look at a graphic, suggestive picture and imagine the whole scenario/course of events, therefore finding a story.