"A picture is worth a thousand words": most good images tell a story, one that is often left to the viewer to imagine. This is particularly so when the images are of people. Sometimes a story is created by using the image in a particular context - curators of contemporary art and photographic galleries are adept at doing it and may assign a temporary meaning to a picture which resonates with specific trends, concerns, understandings, of the public they wish to address.
The title of the image is all important. Even photojournalism does not rely solely on the image to tell a story, but on a combination of an aptly devised title to go with a picture. And in our digital age, the title and the hashtag are essential for the purpose of being discovered in online searches. Few people post images on Instagram without a hashtag.
I once did a shoot with photographer David Nuttall, with whom I used to work a lot when I first started modelling. When he sent me the images from that shoot I was reading Jungian analyst Layton Schapira and her description of the Cassandra woman:
"What the Cassandra woman sees is something dark and painful that may not be apparent on the surface of things, or that objective facts do not corroborate. She may envision a negative or unexpected outcome; or something which would be difficult to deal with; or a truth which others, especially authority figures, would not accept. In her frightened, ego-less state, the Cassandra woman may blurt out what she sees, perhaps with the unconscious hope that others might be able to make some sense of it. But to them, her words sound meaningless, disconnected and blown out of all proportion."
As I looked at the images, I read all this into one of the images, so I entitled it "Cassandra's sorrow" and displayed it with that title on deviantArt. Neither I - nor David - was thinking about Cassandra when shooting, the narrative unraveled later. And it is a narrative that fits.
In another shoot I did with Suki Wilde, the story was discussed in advance. Suki is an actress, a model and also a photographer. She brought several props with her, and we used the theatre where she performs as a location for our shoot. She used a combination of digital and film, her preferred medium being film. For the first part of the shoot, we were on one of the terraces. She suggested a simple storyline, a woman waiting for someone, maybe her lover, who never comes, or perhaps she is starting out on a journey full of hope and then gives in.
There is a lot you can imagine here, the photographs give a suggestion of a story, you the viewer can fill in the gaps. The first images show a bold woman. The final pictures in the series show a dejected, broken woman, finally falling asleep on the dirty floor, in complete disarray. I no longer have the final image, but here you can see the preceding one, which clearly conveys the sense of being deserted, abandoned, rejected and feeling hopeless.
But when it comes to stories created around photographs, nothing will beat the wonderful narrative by Daniela aka drop-asd on deviantArt in one of her early pieces. She took an image of me from 2008, an art nude with then, now photographer, Cidy - I am not able to show the picture here, but it can be seen on deviantArt and wrote "This photo shows a sad love story between an elderly woman who was a brilliant writer and a young boy who delivered her supplies from the local store. They fell in love, but neither his parents nor her children from her first marriage approved so they had to leave the country and move to Spain. Unfortunately, their plane crashed. There were no survivors, but the two lovers died in each other's arms."
I don't think I have ever laughed so much in a long time. The story behind that picture, from my point of view - thus another narrative - is as follows. I wanted to do a shoot that would explore the relationship of an older woman with a younger man and chose the model, Cidy. The photographer, a gifted amateur, who at the time was a close friend, and very much into realistic representation, was not convinced it would work because "there was no truth" - Cidy and I were not even friends, we had only met once to discuss the shoot. On the day of the shoot, the photographer and I had a massive row about the concept, and he wanted to cancel the shoot. I pleaded he should not cancel because Cidy had already left home and was on his way to the studio. When Cidy arrived, he found himself right in the middle of the row. During the shoot, the photographer and I continued arguing, Cidy wanted to get out of the studio as quickly as possible. Eventually, we got a series of shots which showed immense discomfort. And that became the title of the best of those shots, "The discomfort of intimacy."
The point of all this is that to convey a narrative, you need images, but also a few, well-chosen words. Captions and titles are necessary and, like I said, these days you also need hashtags.
Mekita Rivas, in her article, sums it all up: "Be both illustrative and informative when writing photo captions." Excellent advice.
The title of the image is all important. Even photojournalism does not rely solely on the image to tell a story, but on a combination of an aptly devised title to go with a picture. And in our digital age, the title and the hashtag are essential for the purpose of being discovered in online searches. Few people post images on Instagram without a hashtag.
I once did a shoot with photographer David Nuttall, with whom I used to work a lot when I first started modelling. When he sent me the images from that shoot I was reading Jungian analyst Layton Schapira and her description of the Cassandra woman:
"What the Cassandra woman sees is something dark and painful that may not be apparent on the surface of things, or that objective facts do not corroborate. She may envision a negative or unexpected outcome; or something which would be difficult to deal with; or a truth which others, especially authority figures, would not accept. In her frightened, ego-less state, the Cassandra woman may blurt out what she sees, perhaps with the unconscious hope that others might be able to make some sense of it. But to them, her words sound meaningless, disconnected and blown out of all proportion."
As I looked at the images, I read all this into one of the images, so I entitled it "Cassandra's sorrow" and displayed it with that title on deviantArt. Neither I - nor David - was thinking about Cassandra when shooting, the narrative unraveled later. And it is a narrative that fits.
In another shoot I did with Suki Wilde, the story was discussed in advance. Suki is an actress, a model and also a photographer. She brought several props with her, and we used the theatre where she performs as a location for our shoot. She used a combination of digital and film, her preferred medium being film. For the first part of the shoot, we were on one of the terraces. She suggested a simple storyline, a woman waiting for someone, maybe her lover, who never comes, or perhaps she is starting out on a journey full of hope and then gives in.
There is a lot you can imagine here, the photographs give a suggestion of a story, you the viewer can fill in the gaps. The first images show a bold woman. The final pictures in the series show a dejected, broken woman, finally falling asleep on the dirty floor, in complete disarray. I no longer have the final image, but here you can see the preceding one, which clearly conveys the sense of being deserted, abandoned, rejected and feeling hopeless.
But when it comes to stories created around photographs, nothing will beat the wonderful narrative by Daniela aka drop-asd on deviantArt in one of her early pieces. She took an image of me from 2008, an art nude with then, now photographer, Cidy - I am not able to show the picture here, but it can be seen on deviantArt and wrote "This photo shows a sad love story between an elderly woman who was a brilliant writer and a young boy who delivered her supplies from the local store. They fell in love, but neither his parents nor her children from her first marriage approved so they had to leave the country and move to Spain. Unfortunately, their plane crashed. There were no survivors, but the two lovers died in each other's arms."
I don't think I have ever laughed so much in a long time. The story behind that picture, from my point of view - thus another narrative - is as follows. I wanted to do a shoot that would explore the relationship of an older woman with a younger man and chose the model, Cidy. The photographer, a gifted amateur, who at the time was a close friend, and very much into realistic representation, was not convinced it would work because "there was no truth" - Cidy and I were not even friends, we had only met once to discuss the shoot. On the day of the shoot, the photographer and I had a massive row about the concept, and he wanted to cancel the shoot. I pleaded he should not cancel because Cidy had already left home and was on his way to the studio. When Cidy arrived, he found himself right in the middle of the row. During the shoot, the photographer and I continued arguing, Cidy wanted to get out of the studio as quickly as possible. Eventually, we got a series of shots which showed immense discomfort. And that became the title of the best of those shots, "The discomfort of intimacy."
The point of all this is that to convey a narrative, you need images, but also a few, well-chosen words. Captions and titles are necessary and, like I said, these days you also need hashtags.
Mekita Rivas, in her article, sums it all up: "Be both illustrative and informative when writing photo captions." Excellent advice.
My approach to narrative in photography (and saldy, my writing too) has always been... perhaps a little too flimsy.
ReplyDeleteMore conceptual photos that admire often have all kinds of work put into them, with story boards(!?), makeup artists, costume designers, props, etc.
I've never been able to manage anything like that when I was working with anyone else - so self portraits.
Usually in my shoots, if I'm making it up as I go, the narrative is exploratory. I imagine my model as Alice, exploring wonderland - because that's almost how I feel. Through the Camera Eye, everything is something new to look at, and maybe photograph - everything is exploration.
Following a shoot, I often create a narrative for an image (rather than a set) by looking at the expression of the model, or the positioning of a flower, or object, and think "what does this say to me?"
Then I come up with the first phrase, which in an impressionist sort of way delivers the mood or feeling of the image without necessarily having a context or making any sense.
It works for me, but it's a very loose process that doesn't stack up against those more conceptual shoots I admire.
PHYDEAU left the following comment, which I accidentally deleted
ReplyDeleteMy approach to shoots is to go in with only one or two specific images in mind, and then play with the idea as we go along. The spontaneity usually results in better than what I envisioned in the first place.
The titles always come later. My piece, "Housing Authority" was actually titled by the model, and amazingly we both had a similar idea about that umbrella being some kind of shelter.
Thank you so very much Eric and Rab for sharing how you create images, it is fascinating to hear you discuss your creative process. I see that you too Eric often discover a narrative in a shot that was not apparent when you took it. Great stuff!
ReplyDeleteYour writing continues to be very thought provoking. I got to wondering about that expression of a picture being worth a thousand words, so I did a little bit of research. What an amazing thing the Internet is. There are many theories as to where the expression came from, but it appears as though it is of American origin and that it came about in the early part of the twentieth century. Several sources attribute the phrase to Frederick R. Bernard, who wrote a piece on the effectiveness of advertising, which was titled “One Look is worth a thousand words”.
ReplyDeleteHaving spent many years as a newspaper photographer I was always of the opinion that a photograph had to contain a certain amount of truth. I always looked disdainfully at advertising, being of the opinion that whatever I saw was fabricated and that its intent was to sell me something that I really didn’t want or need. But I grew up in a very different world than the one we live in now. A few years ago I was teaching a photojournalism class and I took an informal poll of my young students to see how they felt about the photographs they saw in print. It turns out that for the most part they were pretty cynical. They were suspicious of pretty much everything they saw, whether it was journalistic or commercial.
What I have come to believe is that, while a photograph might contain some truth, it is only my personal truth, and it’s quite possible that viewers will read something into an image that I never saw or intended. It’s also possible that whatever story I had been trying to tell might get lost.
These days I’m less concerned about the number of words that my photographs evoke, as much as I’m interested in the feelings that are conveyed. I find that, whether I’m viewing an image on a web page, or on a wall in a museum, I need quiet. I need to let the image settle in for a while so that I have time to examine my feelings about the image. While the words certainly have value, they come later. W. Eugene Smith, one of the fathers of modern photojournalism, once said “What use is having great depth of field, if there is no depth of feeling?” To me, that is where the true power of photography lies.
Sometimes immense discomfort works - and it certainly did here. Whether intentional or not your look (which speaks rejection) makes the image.
ReplyDeleteSo the story coming out of the image was the product of what went before it even if what went before it did not necessarily intend to produce that image..... Perhaps.
In my own shooting I more often than not find that the story emerges only at the time of the shoot, or afterwards. I wish I could plan more conceptually.