Every Camera Tells a Story: Photography and Narrative

“Every picture tells a story, don’t it?” Rod Stewart sings in the song of the same name. Although it isn’t clear whether the lyrics refer to a painting or a photograph, the storytelling potential of photography is clear. Although visual works of art in general may be seen as attempts to capture a reflection of the creator’s own inner vision or an instant sliced out of the flow of life around us, the immediacy of a photograph brings us much closer to another reality and is more clearly a witnessing of unfolding story than many other art forms.

Much has been written on the role of story in human life: how we use stories to understand the world, how we create stories in our own lives and how these narratives shape so much of our behavior and attitudes throughout our life. It has been said that the human brain is programmed to make sense of the world through narratives. So it seems that the impulse to organize information through storymaking and the impulse to make art which is inspired by those stories is an integral part of us. Enter the photograph, a hybrid of real-time witnessing and artistic vision, with photographers falling everywhere along the spectrum from bare bones, photojournalistic reportage to the most abstract art photography.

In his book, Vision in Motion: A Photographer’s Guide to Digital Video, Trevor Meier discusses differences between motion and still photography. One of those key differences lies in how the two forms express a narrative line. Meier observes that in video we follow an arc of movement, surveying the flow of events and deciding how to use multiple images to capture the full story.

In still photography we are more concerned with finding that instant which Henri Cartier-Bresson called “the decisive moment” – the single slice out of time in which everything converges to capture the right image.

Sometimes of course we set out to tell a complete story in pictures. That leads us to forms like the photo essay or photo documentary. But even when we make a single photograph, we slice out one moment of the larger “story” of our subject. In some way that slice is representative of the entire story. It is, first of all, maybe the only part of that story that we’ll ever see. Second, because it is the part that we’ve chosen to commit to film (or sensor, as the case may be), we have decided that it is the moment that best represents the “story” of that subject as we understand it to be. Then viewers are invited to extrapolate on the rest of the story from the clues in the image.

Consider a photograph of a girl stepping off a bus. Contained in that photograph is a link to present and past and future. This image of the girl and the bus freezes one instant out of the larger flow of movement from past to future, inviting us to fill in the blanks. While we might not know everything about this girl and her life, from the elements of this photograph we can build a story around her: her coat and shoes are a little worn and out of style; she’s carrying books as well as a purse; she looks tired. All these things create a context for the photograph. Even a photograph of a flower helps capture a piece of its story: do we capture it in full bloom, showing one aspect of its larger cycle? Or close-up to show the parts which reveal its nature?

Finding the story in photographs works on the other side of the lens, too, as we recreate the stories in images as we view them, and project our own stories on them as well. Photographs have been used as prompts for writing exercises and poetry. They are also used as a tool for therapy, where people create stories around photographs that they see. Artists use photographs as references for the creation of other kinds of art.

Although other kinds of visual art have also been used in creative writing and therapy, photographs seem to evoke a sense of immediacy and connectedness that paintings and drawings lack. These kinds of images offer an interpretation of the subject, developed in many cases after the fact – an interpretation which puts them at one remove from the instant of seeing. The capacity of the camera to act as a witness, to capture an image from a moment of real time shared by photographer and subject, creates an immediacy that invites viewers in and opens doors to worlds beyond their own.

The camera’s unique ability to freeze moments of life gives photography its unique relationship to narrative – a unique blend of witnessing and creation that reveals things not only about the world around us but also about ourselves.