FrankS
Registered User
This comes from another thread where I suggested that an image can stand on its own or can be used as part of a series to tell a story. Someone responded, in part:
There is an phtojournalism, which brings you the information, may it be immediate news, or long story/research. For that photography is probably a medium that's slowly fading away (in favor of video, etc.). Anyway, it's easier to convey the information with series of photographs. I dont even think you can have story or news described with one photo, unless it's a small fact or event, that does not require any follow up.
This got me thinking and came up with this:
IMO, the essential power of photography IS its ability to tell a story (or present its salient aspect) in a single image. Video is like (verbose) prose, a photograph is like poetry. Poetry can be powerful for the volumes it says in a limited number of words. For me, photography is like that.
Edit added: I'm thinking of Haiku poetry in particular.
Your thoughts?
There is an phtojournalism, which brings you the information, may it be immediate news, or long story/research. For that photography is probably a medium that's slowly fading away (in favor of video, etc.). Anyway, it's easier to convey the information with series of photographs. I dont even think you can have story or news described with one photo, unless it's a small fact or event, that does not require any follow up.
This got me thinking and came up with this:
IMO, the essential power of photography IS its ability to tell a story (or present its salient aspect) in a single image. Video is like (verbose) prose, a photograph is like poetry. Poetry can be powerful for the volumes it says in a limited number of words. For me, photography is like that.
Edit added: I'm thinking of Haiku poetry in particular.
Your thoughts?
daveleo
what?
True, but on the other side . . . A lot (a LOT) of poetry is obscure and misunderstood, and a single still photo can easily be misinterpreted. So . . . yes, a still photo is a bit like a poem.
MIkhail
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thebelbo
Member
I tend to agree: as mediums evolve, their use changes and they are relieved of their most practical aspects. Key use for painting & sculpture use to be portrait. With the emergence of photography this was not anymore the case, the art lost some of its most practical aspect and became more abstract. Similarly a photo story was a way to tell a story 50 years ago and before the emergence of video & documentaries, photography remains relevant but as more of a more abstract art, cheers
Panos
Panos
FrankS
Registered User
No, no! "That guy" stimulated my brain. Thanks!
anjoca76
Well-known
I think misinterpretation is OK in art. Frustrating for the artist at times, sure, but there is little we can do about that, short of explaining ourselves all the time.
Photography is something I do for me, as an enthusiastic hobby, but songwriting is something I've been doing semi-professionally for a very long time, and there have been plenty of times when people connect deeply with a song I've written, thinking it means something entirely different than what I intended. It used to bother me, but I've come to learn that connecting with art is way better than not connecting at all. Think of all the happy newlyweds who have chosen "Every Breath You Take" as their wedding song, when that song is actually about stalking!
Photography is similar. We make images for a particular reason, hoping that it conveys a story, or a mood, but once we put it out there for public consumption, we cannot control how it is interpreted. That is powerful in and of itself.
Photography is something I do for me, as an enthusiastic hobby, but songwriting is something I've been doing semi-professionally for a very long time, and there have been plenty of times when people connect deeply with a song I've written, thinking it means something entirely different than what I intended. It used to bother me, but I've come to learn that connecting with art is way better than not connecting at all. Think of all the happy newlyweds who have chosen "Every Breath You Take" as their wedding song, when that song is actually about stalking!
Photography is similar. We make images for a particular reason, hoping that it conveys a story, or a mood, but once we put it out there for public consumption, we cannot control how it is interpreted. That is powerful in and of itself.
FrankS
Registered User
Good point .
MIkhail
-
I would argue that there is actually no possibility for single photographic image, or group of photographs for that matter, to tell an OBJECTIVE story. It's always the interpretation. The less of it = good reporter.
FrankS
Registered User
Maybe we should take out the journalism aspect of this discussion. Bias is in most any presentation even if the journalist spends time behind both "lines".
Wouter
Well-known
Photography, in my honest opinion, is not objective. It always communicates either what the photographer meant to say with it, or what the receiver wants to see in it. That said, one photograph can be composed of multiple layers of meaning. The combination of these layers, or how this combination is interpreted, can tell a story. However, this might be a story not evident to every receiver or, better, multiple stories might be possible on the basis of one photograph.
Phil_F_NM
Camera hacker
I think there is a certain amount of ambiguity that the photographer leaves in the single image which leaves open a "zone" of interpretation for the viewer. Some photos are just straight, in-your-face, views of an event leaving little open to interpretation but as such they also don't have the ability to tell as much of a story since a subtle ambiguity or openness to interpretation isn't there. Conversely, there can be too much ambiguity, then we just get the photo of something with no context, no story and are left with only questions but not a real compelling reason to ask them either.
It's like the difference between reading a great book and letting the imagination draw the overall scene vs. watching a movie and being constrained by the director's vision. The former is the good photo with that certain bit of ambiguity and the latter is the in-your-face image that leaves no interpretation.
There is a lot to be said for one photo that leaves no room for interpretation but the world isn't black and white, neither are events, so there should always be questions to be asked about another point of view regarding what is in an image as nothing is absolute.
I'm rambling.
Phil Forrest
It's like the difference between reading a great book and letting the imagination draw the overall scene vs. watching a movie and being constrained by the director's vision. The former is the good photo with that certain bit of ambiguity and the latter is the in-your-face image that leaves no interpretation.
There is a lot to be said for one photo that leaves no room for interpretation but the world isn't black and white, neither are events, so there should always be questions to be asked about another point of view regarding what is in an image as nothing is absolute.
I'm rambling.
Phil Forrest
Sparrow
Veteran
... I think folk take it all too seriously sometimes
this dashing photographer from Shelf
who is often too pleased with himself
thought Haiku short, did none of the sort
you should try other genera yourself
............
who is often too pleased with himself
thought Haiku short, did none of the sort
you should try other genera yourself
............
froyd
Veteran
I'm paraphrasing Winogrand here, but in a strict sense, no photograph tells a story. It captures a moment and reduces it to two-dimensional light on surface. Anything beyond that is on the viewer.
However, I definitely thinks there's lost of narrative potential in an image. A picture of a spilled glass of milk and a kid looking panicked/guilty gives you a pretty good idea of what happened before, what might happened later, and other details in the photograph can be teased out to enrich the vignette.
Personally, in pictures where the narrative elements are the main draw, I like if the story is mysterious and unresolved, as opposed to have a clear story arch? Why is the subject standing at the edge of the steps? What's the out of focus hand doing at the edge of the frame? What's hidden in beyond the circle of light coming from the desk lamp?
However, I definitely thinks there's lost of narrative potential in an image. A picture of a spilled glass of milk and a kid looking panicked/guilty gives you a pretty good idea of what happened before, what might happened later, and other details in the photograph can be teased out to enrich the vignette.
Personally, in pictures where the narrative elements are the main draw, I like if the story is mysterious and unresolved, as opposed to have a clear story arch? Why is the subject standing at the edge of the steps? What's the out of focus hand doing at the edge of the frame? What's hidden in beyond the circle of light coming from the desk lamp?
Peter_wrote:
Well-known
don't have to add much. but i think, that is a really nice comparison.
nevertheless in a poem the writer can choose every word. a photographer is in most cases not such a master of his picture.
btgc
Veteran
Photography balances between power and poverty. Very often poverty looks like power and vice versa. Viewer has to spend some time and efforts to distinct them.
cz23
-
For me, this issue hinges on one's meaning of the word "story." Does it mean a narrative, in the journalistic sense of who, what, where, when, and why? Or can a story be more interpretive and suggestive, as in the case of Ruth Orkin's photo, American Girl in Italy, a picture that certainly tells a "story," but with a single very poetic image.
Poetry can do both. There are many examples of narrative poems. But I think the OP is suggesting photography's affinity with lyric poetry -- relatively few words chosen and arranged for their suggestive power. In that sense I agree that a single photograph can be equally evocative as a poem.
The main difference, I think, is that a photograph leaves more to the viewer. Words can have the same subjectivity, but they give a poet much greater ability to lead the reader along an intended pathway.
BTW, over the past year I've been writing poems for some of my photographs, so this subject is close to my heart. See the Tongues of Trees book in the poetry section of my web site.
John
Poetry can do both. There are many examples of narrative poems. But I think the OP is suggesting photography's affinity with lyric poetry -- relatively few words chosen and arranged for their suggestive power. In that sense I agree that a single photograph can be equally evocative as a poem.
The main difference, I think, is that a photograph leaves more to the viewer. Words can have the same subjectivity, but they give a poet much greater ability to lead the reader along an intended pathway.
BTW, over the past year I've been writing poems for some of my photographs, so this subject is close to my heart. See the Tongues of Trees book in the poetry section of my web site.
John
Sparrow
Veteran
... the narrative is that bit of a story which is not dialogue ... it's not that difficult really
rhl-oregon
Cameras Guitars Wonders
I'll speak here as a poet, a prose poet (invented/described in France in the 1840s, same decade as photography), and as a writer of what began in the early 1990s to be called "flash fiction"--essentially, anything fictive compressed into no more than 750 words. I'm committed to narrative and to clarity as well, as a person of 60 (though as a young writer I loved making things difficult, obscure, ambiguous and endlessly allusive, to prove to anyone that I was a Serious Artist in a World of Philistines and Dummies).
Yes to Frank's premise that a single photograph is closer to a poem than to a story, which will always have some of the visual narrative continuity that we 20th century natives associate with cinema. And many photographs operate the same way that certain brief poems (couplets, haiku, tanka) get their strength from using the fewest and best possible words to impress a moment's image into the reader, and to suggest an eventful depth, future, past, beyond that moment. It's just that the photograph deploys the images directly, and must find (or pose) its visual metaphor--or allow the viewer to find her own. (Though some photographers, me included, love inserting signage, verbal graffiti, bits of language into the otherwise visual-centric.)
There was a recent wonderful Gallery shot by Doug of a boy sweeping the back entry of a work-space, surrounded by outdoor stairs admitting slats of bright light that create a pattern of containment around him. The boy's pushbroom was planted in his own own shadow; he and his shadow were the only major ungeometrical shapes in the shot; and I saw immediately, as a poet-viewer that he was sweeping his shadow: an impossible and never-ending task, but in a formally well-designed and deeply satisfying representation. Whether Doug "saw" that the same way I did is not the point. He caught a casual moment in an elegant design, leaving room for the philosopher/critic in each of us to find something spiritual, intellectual, emotional and/or moral to discover.
Furthermore, when I looked in the Galley comments, I found Doug's photo with my comment flanked by photos by Phil (tigerphil) and CheC, similarly creating from few visual elements a lyrical, poetic, meditative moment--Phil with a mantel clock and a mirror and a sly self-portrait on the pendulum, CheC with a woman walking away in a vast grove of snowy trees, sheltered by a lipstick-bright umbrella. Were I inclined to generalize from this small cluster of evidence, I'd argue that photographers are more like poets than like writers of narrative prose--not just that photographs are like poems in a world where novels and films are far more richly rewarded.
All this operates somewhat differently--with more complication if not necessarily more complexity--in photographs with more characters, larger spaces/perspectives, more or less well-known types of locale. But lyric poems--brief spontaneous outbursts--are not the only poems. As we had epic and narrative poetry long before the heyday of the novel, we had still images in ink, paint, and silver, alone or in sequence, long before their cinematic development. Perhaps these more complicated photographs are closer to the openings, or climaxes, or denouements of short stories. A lot of short story writers are on record expressing that they have more in common with poets than with novelists, in any case. That form, too, was pretty much invented in the same decade as photography. It's just another step to see how photo-essays create a series of dynamic moments/encounters like short stories, or narrative poems.
This also dovetails with how photographers respond to the frequently posed Either/Or-- Do you shoot each photograph as a unique event" / "Do you shoot individual photographs as parts of a series (essay, project, etc)"--discussed elsewhere on RFF. Happily that choice is rhetorical and preferential, not binding or exclusive.
I should endnote here, as I've written elsewhere in RFF, that I although came back to photography from a life of writing and teaching writing, a good deal of my decades of writing and publishing drew on what I absorbed from the history of painting, drawing, and most especially from documentary photography from the US Civil War forward. More similarities than differences, then. Just a shift in media and instrumentation.
Thanks for the prompt, Frank.
Yes to Frank's premise that a single photograph is closer to a poem than to a story, which will always have some of the visual narrative continuity that we 20th century natives associate with cinema. And many photographs operate the same way that certain brief poems (couplets, haiku, tanka) get their strength from using the fewest and best possible words to impress a moment's image into the reader, and to suggest an eventful depth, future, past, beyond that moment. It's just that the photograph deploys the images directly, and must find (or pose) its visual metaphor--or allow the viewer to find her own. (Though some photographers, me included, love inserting signage, verbal graffiti, bits of language into the otherwise visual-centric.)
There was a recent wonderful Gallery shot by Doug of a boy sweeping the back entry of a work-space, surrounded by outdoor stairs admitting slats of bright light that create a pattern of containment around him. The boy's pushbroom was planted in his own own shadow; he and his shadow were the only major ungeometrical shapes in the shot; and I saw immediately, as a poet-viewer that he was sweeping his shadow: an impossible and never-ending task, but in a formally well-designed and deeply satisfying representation. Whether Doug "saw" that the same way I did is not the point. He caught a casual moment in an elegant design, leaving room for the philosopher/critic in each of us to find something spiritual, intellectual, emotional and/or moral to discover.
Furthermore, when I looked in the Galley comments, I found Doug's photo with my comment flanked by photos by Phil (tigerphil) and CheC, similarly creating from few visual elements a lyrical, poetic, meditative moment--Phil with a mantel clock and a mirror and a sly self-portrait on the pendulum, CheC with a woman walking away in a vast grove of snowy trees, sheltered by a lipstick-bright umbrella. Were I inclined to generalize from this small cluster of evidence, I'd argue that photographers are more like poets than like writers of narrative prose--not just that photographs are like poems in a world where novels and films are far more richly rewarded.
All this operates somewhat differently--with more complication if not necessarily more complexity--in photographs with more characters, larger spaces/perspectives, more or less well-known types of locale. But lyric poems--brief spontaneous outbursts--are not the only poems. As we had epic and narrative poetry long before the heyday of the novel, we had still images in ink, paint, and silver, alone or in sequence, long before their cinematic development. Perhaps these more complicated photographs are closer to the openings, or climaxes, or denouements of short stories. A lot of short story writers are on record expressing that they have more in common with poets than with novelists, in any case. That form, too, was pretty much invented in the same decade as photography. It's just another step to see how photo-essays create a series of dynamic moments/encounters like short stories, or narrative poems.
This also dovetails with how photographers respond to the frequently posed Either/Or-- Do you shoot each photograph as a unique event" / "Do you shoot individual photographs as parts of a series (essay, project, etc)"--discussed elsewhere on RFF. Happily that choice is rhetorical and preferential, not binding or exclusive.
I should endnote here, as I've written elsewhere in RFF, that I although came back to photography from a life of writing and teaching writing, a good deal of my decades of writing and publishing drew on what I absorbed from the history of painting, drawing, and most especially from documentary photography from the US Civil War forward. More similarities than differences, then. Just a shift in media and instrumentation.
Thanks for the prompt, Frank.