How do you communicate emotion in photos?

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Pickett Wilson

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One of the things I've always struggled with is attaching the emotion surrounding a photo to the photo itself. Trying to make the photo actually convey the feeling I experienced when I pressed the shutter button. Garry Winogrand is quoted as saying that "photos have no narrative content.They only describe light on surfaces." And I have to, from experience, agree.

Winogrand's way of dealing with this problem was to wait a year or more before looking at the proof sheets and seeing if the photos still worked after he had forgotten the emotion connected with them, a process that doesn't work for me. I'm deliberately trying to attach that emotion.

I'm not sure it's possible to "bake" a specific feeling into a photo. Perhaps every photo will mean something different to each viewer. But I keep trying.

Anyone struggle with this? Have any thoughts on a solution?
 
Perhaps every photo will mean something different to each viewer
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Certainly there's truth in that. You have limited control over how your photos will be interpreted by others. Everyone brings their own life experience, current mood, viewing context, etc to their interpretation. The same photo may trigger different emotions in different viewers.
Photos that give commonly accepted cues to emotion (sadness, joy, loneliness) may trigger similar responses in viewers. Maybe in that case it's possible to bake in a specific feeling, as much as that is possible. So I guess it depends on the subject matter and the way it was shot, e.g. tearful subject isolated from crowd by shallow dof.
I can usually clearly recall the emotion I was feeling when I took a particular photo. One could say each photo anchors the thoughts and emotions I had at the time. But whether others share those feelings depends partly on things over which I have no control.
 
I see some photos where i believe the photographer is trying to convey emotions by reference, an approach that may work with some viewers, but is not certain. Photos of children, for example, stir emotions in viewers by reference as they think of interactions with their own children. But I have no children, thus no reference, so these photos trigger no emotional reaction.

It may be, as you say, that we simply have no ultimate control how our photos are understood.
 
It may be possible to "bake in" an emotion, as you say, but to the viewer, or some viewers, it may feel that way. We've all seen photos which try to make us sad or whatever, and they can seem trite and forced in some way.

I guess the simple way to have emotion in the photo is to actually have emotional content, not take a regular street photo, call it "Loneliness", and demand the viewer agrees with you.
 
Well, I agree it is easier to photograph emotion than to convey the photographer's emotion through a photograph. But as you suggest, photos of emotion often feel cheap.
 
Pickett Wilson said:
Anyone struggle with this? Have any thoughts on a solution?
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I think anyone who does not struggle with how to attach meaning to a photograph is just producing eye candy.

I think there are a few ways to cope with this problem. I think the most successful one is probably to have some sort of text accompany the pictures. Most commonly a picture or a series of pictures has, at the very least, a title which influences how the viewer looks at the picture(s). Of course we all know that titles are often not very descriptive and sometimes seem to have little if anything at all to do with the photos but even then the viewer is influenced because he/she tries to solve the mystery of of the title through looking at the pictures.
And then, of course, you can also have lengthy descriptions, documents, articles, poems, quotes and any other kind of text imaginable accompany pictures.

Apart from text, I think the only other thing one can use to convey meaning through a photograph is convention (although one might argue that text falls under convention, too).

One example is presentation. If you present a photograph in a context the viewer is familiar with then he/she will be inclined to take it a certain way. If, e.g. I see a photograph that is presented like advertising (e.g. on a billboard) then I am likely to make that association. Or one can present several images together which might raise the question for the viewer what the pictures say about eachother. If I put the portrait of a person next to an image of maggots eating at a cadaver the viewer is probably inclined to think that whatever I'm trying to say about that person isn't very good.

Another example is aesthetic convention, i.e. presenting the content of the photograph in a certain way that is conventionally used for a specific kind of message. E.g. if I photograph a subject in a glossy, overproduced kind of way then the viewer might recognize that I'm not trying to convey something natural. One might also use aesthetic convention in the sense of referring to a certain photographic or pictorial tradition.

Anyways, the problem is always that the interpretation of pictures (and text for that matter) is highly dependent on what and how much the viewer knows and you cannot control that. A deeply personal experience will always be personal just to you and you can never convey that the its full extent. All you can hope for is that others share your experiences to a certain degree and that they can recognize that in the pictures.
 
Jamie, one thing I have come to understand as I have gotten older is the rapidly diminishing number of people who understand my cultural and art related references in photos. It's hard to believe references to Gilligan's Island aren't universally understood. :)

You make some good points.
 
Composition, placement of light source, tonality, grain, motion blur. Some of these are accidental, but were chosen, as they are in the image. Then timing, particularly facial expression, hand gestures and body posture. In short, there are innumerable ways that emotion can be included in an image. I don't think you can very often attach that emotion. Rather, it just comes as part of your emotional response in the taking of the image.
 
thegman said:
I guess the simple way to have emotion in the photo is to actually have emotional content.
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I think we can certainly recognize certain emotions of people in photographs but how we feel about what we're seeing is still completely open. Let's say we have a photograph of a crying woman in front of her house and we present this picture to two American democrats. To the first we show the picture with the title "Woman outside her foreclosed home" which might make him feel very sad looking at the picture. To the second we show the exact same picture but with the title "Tea-Party activist after Obama has won the election" and it will likely not make him feel sad at all or even happy.
So even having emotional content does not control the emotional response of the viewer.
 
Pickett Wilson said:
Jamie, one thing I have come to understand as I have gotten older is the rapidly diminishing number of people who understand my cultural and art related references in photos. It's hard to believe references to Gilligan's Island aren't universally understood. :)

You make some good points.
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Haha same here! :)
Pop culture is a fickle thing, though. I'm "only" in my late 20s and even I start to notice that I'm getting older. A while ago I was talking to a couple of 25 year olds and made a reference to Al Bundy from Married with Children. The response was "Al who??".
 
Jamie123 said:
I think we can certainly recognize certain emotions of people in photographs but how we feel about what we're seeing is still completely open. Let's say we have a photograph of a crying woman in front of her house and we present this picture to two American democrats. To the first we show the picture with the title "Woman outside her foreclosed home" which might make him feel very sad looking at the picture. To the second we show the exact same picture but with the title "Tea-Party activist after Obama has won the election" and it will likely not make him feel sad at all or even happy.
So even having emotional content does not control the emotional response of the viewer.
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I see, you're quite right, I suppose because I don't take photos of people, I've never really had to think about it.
 
One word: semiotics. One other word, as Jamie123 says: convention.

The enormous problem is when the photographer is unable to separate how he/she felt from taking the picture, and what anyone else might reasonably interpret the picture as meaning. I generally don't find it that difficult to look at a picture and imagine that I didn't take it; in other words, to separate the picture and my emotional baggage. Yes, it's easier to do this after (say) a year but you can train yourself to do it quicker -- often a LOT quicker.

What or where is "Gilligan's Island"? I've heard the phrase, but I haven't any real idea what it refers to, except that I think it may be a television programme that is locally popular in a country where they habitually mis-spell 'programme'.

Cheers,

R.
 
Pickett,

Seems to me that it is nearly impossible to convey the photographer's emotions at the time of shooting the picture in the picture itself, unless it is for the most obvious emotions.

A shot from a filled football stadium will likely pass a sense of awe when seeing all those people and the scale of it, but that is because everybody would have that feeling, it's nearly universal.

Seeing a personal item that belonged to a deceased loved one will likely cause a sense of loss or loneliness, but to take a picture that would relay exactly that might be a lot more complicated!

In both cases I feel one would need to apply photographic skills to relay the emotions.

In the first case I would chose a wide angle lens or a semi-fish eye, optimum DOF, almost HDR-like lighting so that both highlights and darker areas are well-exposed and show the crowd. Take either a high or particularly low POV.

In the second case I would use very shallow DOF to isolate the item. Maybe use B&W or sepia, show the marks of use or age. But beyond that, I wouldn't know. And those choices to me would be only the beginning, I'm fairly certain that spectators could get a wholly different emotion from seeing that picture...

In either case, a title or description would greatly add to relaying the emotion, but considering your question, I would find that 'cheating':D
 
Pickett Wilson said:
One of the things I've always struggled with is attaching the emotion surrounding a photo to the photo itself. Trying to make the photo actually convey the feeling I experienced when I pressed the shutter button. Garry Winogrand is quoted as saying that "photos have no narrative content.They only describe light on surfaces." And I have to, from experience, agree.

Winogrand's way of dealing with this problem was to wait a year or more before looking at the proof sheets and seeing if the photos still worked after he had forgotten the emotion connected with them, a process that doesn't work for me. I'm deliberately trying to attach that emotion.

I'm not sure it's possible to "bake" a specific feeling into a photo. Perhaps every photo will mean something different to each viewer. But I keep trying.

Anyone struggle with this? Have any thoughts on a solution?
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"Anyone struggle with is?" You betcha!

After years of trying to convey my thoughts and emotions through photography, I finally wrote the following note to myself and keep it with me: "As a photographer, no matter how you feel about a scene a camera does not record your feelings. It just records what is there."

The photograph that finally turned the tide for me was taken from the driver's seat of my car. I was on a road that is normally heavily congested during rush hour, but it had snowed a lot the night before and only I and one other fool were on the road. I thought, "This will take a tremendous picture! There's normally lots of cars, and now there's only that one way up there! This is awesome!" What I got was a picture of an empty road with snow on it. There was no "absence of hundreds of cars." I could not convey my emotion and wonder at such a site, because I couldn't take a picture of what was not there. Certainly no-one who didn't have to fight that traffic day after day on that particular road would have any idea what I was feeling at the moment. The instant I saw the picture (it was a digital camera), I realized I had been chasing an unreachable goal. The photographer's thoughts and emotions do not have anything at all to do with what the camera captures.


Post processing photographs, with dodging and burning, can bring the photographs closer to what You saw, and what you intended for others to see. You can go further and make it no longer just a photograph of a scene, but a work of art with various additions and subtractions. But the raw photograph just cannot communicate to you or others your personal reality - just what was there in front of the lens at the moment the shutter opened.

Perhaps this aspect of photography is where the philosophy of "Make a photograph rather than Take a photograph" comes from. If one carefully constructs a scene, and lights it just right, one can convey feelings and emotions. There are lots of experts in doing that. But the feelings and emotions aren't the ones felt by the photographer at that moment; They come from the subjects and scenes in front of the lens.
 
I think you need to connect and understand the subject in order to convey emotion.
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This is an interesting discussion, but my take is that sometimes its best not to have all the answers when it comes to photography.
 
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