Call & Response

The Call: Guess What’s for Dinner? — Jessica

Narrative. Story. In certain photography circles it’s a big deal and a constant topic of conversation. The ultimate goal is to tell stories with your photographs.

But a story has a beginning, a middle and an end. How do you translate that into a single frame? I tried to do that today, but it was not a good day to experiment with this format. Too many demands on my time left me with precious little time to attempt to fully translate a story into one good shot.

I suppose what is truly lacking from the shopping cart photo is context. Now, if I had changed the angle so that you could see the long lines all around me, and maybe if I had included a crying child then you would have known instantly the back story — “uh oh, someone didn’t plan well and now has to be at the grocery store at the witching hour to figure out what to feed her family for dinner.”

This narrative stuff is hard and I think it will take a lot more practice.

Response: A Grey (Great?) Day for Golf — Cheryl

Yes, storytelling with one shot. Indeed. I’ve seen some great examples of it, and I think I’ve captured a story here and there, but thus far, I haven’t found the secret. Most of the time I can’t even find the story in a photo created by someone else, even when they tell me it’s there. I see a picture that looks a lot like the old vacation photos (taken with 110 film) that fill boxes on top of my bookcases. Very often, it just looks like mediocre photography to me.

When I do stumble upon a great storytelling photo, though, I know it immediately — but I can’t explain why (ok, I’ve never really tried to explain why, but I’ve done plenty of it with literature that is meaningful to me). Is that part of the formula, for lack of a better word? If you have to explain yourself, you haven’t been successful — at least not for that particular viewer. It always comes back to the words of Professor Bernard Schopen: “Literature leaves you with questions; fiction gives you all the answers.”