Narrative Photography Saturday January 27, 2007
The photograph is an incomplete utterance, a message that depends on some external matrix of conditions and presuppositions for its readibility
Allan Sekula, On The Invention Of Photographic Meaning, in Thinking Photography, Burgin 1982: 85
Photographically, one of the most interesting facets of my recent Photography MA concerned narrative construction. In art photography, which is where my influences used to lie, you create or find a great picture that stands on its own aesthetic terms. I love mountains: while a photo may have considerable narrative content – a day’s walk, a summit achieved etc – the photographic image essentially records a moment of beauty divorced from its behind the scenes significance. It testifies to the fact that such places exist, that in certain geographic parts nature is raw, beautiful, and sublime, in the sense in which u>Edmund Burke used that term
The final project is to produce a book, and the assumption is it has a narrative structure like a documentary article. I could have challenged that; I challenged other assumptions and ideas on the course as they pertained to photographic culture and habitual practices. Susan Sontag once gave a lecture in which she declared photography to have a pre-eminent role in the humanities, as a sophisticated and inherent educational process. I agree; it’s a wonderful conceptual tool. Because it’s not located in any discernible category – sociology, commerce, psychology, politics, art, whatever – it interfaces with them all and thus invisibly offers a means of approaching them all.
Interesting narrative image:
My u>mountain photography interests are broadly located u>in the category of art, albeit with a considerable u>philosophical/symbolic component resting on psychology. It’s not aesthetic castle-in-the-sky stuff. On the contrary, I’ve laboured hard to question such castle building as it pertains to intellectual and cultural trends; you can see some of my work at this web site.
I could have continued my interest in mountains on my MA, but chose instead to find a cultural/sociological topic I found interesting that allowed for and required the construction of narrative in sociological terms, consistent with this observation:
The photograph, as it stands alone, presents merely the possibility of meaning. Only by its embeddedness in a concrete discourse situation can the photograph yield a clear semantic outcome (Sekula in Burgin 1982: 91).
I’ll walk the hills in my own time; at the final stage of my MA I decided to undertake a photo-essay about jazz. I initially considered a documentary-historic focus, juxtaposing the latter with current bands and live music. I researched this on the internet, phoned university academics, a BBC journalist and local enthusiasts, and discovered the subject had some potential. There was a network of people, and people who knew people, who could provide me with documentary content. There’s a local jazz appreciation society the secretary of which provided me with a list of about twenty phone numbers. I’ve pursued this a little, contacting and photographing former sax player Johnny Roadhouse and the people currently maintaining the building of what used to be the pre-eminent jazz venue in Manchester, Band On The Wall. But I’m no longer interested, for the MA project, in a historic based documentary. That leaves me with u>a growing collection of jazz photos, and the need to organise them into a narrative structure. This is the structure: the culture of jazz, which I enjoy, and how and to what extent it is possible to identify what gives jazz its musical identity.
I will organise my photos into a book, and at some point also re-present them on my web site in a narrative pattern. Technically there are several ways of doing this; Adobe Photoshop for example provides a self-contained gallery building function allowing for the use of text alongside images. The strategic placing of the two creates a narrative, what’s sometimes been called the third effect where words locate, define and explain the significance of the photograph. Although actually, I’m quite interested in slideshow narratives with sound as seen at u>Magnum in Motion I intend to create some sound-slideshows, and research a little more the psychology and aesthetics of this emerging photography-hybrid form.
I’m resistant to assumed or habitual constructions of narrative, wherever I find them. In recent years, notably since 9/11, we’ve been undergoing what is probably an inevitable and certainly a necessary re-evaluation of religious narrative. This is focussing on Islam, currently presenting the worldwide problem we see in the news almost every day and criticised intelligently u>here although a few hundred years ago Christianity also had a violent arrogance, imposing itself onto others. Salman Rushdie once said the fatwa imposed on him was “an extreme form of literary criticism”. That was a wonderful remark, elegantly reframing the barbarity in philosophical terms. It was precise, concise, and had profound implications. Religion is itself a narrative construction, based on narrative texts, but enacted, expressed, and sanctified otherwise. It’s being increasingly questioned, and rightly so:
Our age is the age of criticism, to which everything must be subjected. The sacredness of religion, and the authority of legislation, are by many regarded as grounds of exemption from the examination of this tribunal. But, if they are exempted, they become the subjects of just suspicion, and cannot lay claim to sincere respect, which reason accords only to that which has stood the test of a free and public examination
Kant: The Critique of Pure Reason, Preface, 1781
Deconstruction of narrative is one of the characteristics of the contemporary world, and a very fine one with u>considerable, relevant philosophical value. I don’t subscribe to postmodernist trends resting on insubstantial relativism where you conclude, à la Jean Baudrillard, that we live in an arbitrary simulacrum world. WB Yeats wrote “things fall apart; the centre cannot hold”, but that doesn’t mean there is no centre; it means its being re-evaluated. Here it is in context:
Turning and turning in the widening gyre
The falcon cannot hear the falconer;
Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold;
Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world,
The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere
The ceremony of innocence is drowned;
The best lack all conviction, while the worst
Are full of passionate intensity.
Surely some revelation is at hand;
Surely the Second Coming is at hand.
The Second Coming! Hardly are those words out
When a vast image out of “Spiritus Mundi”
Troubles my sight: somewhere in sands of the desert
A shape with lion body and the head of a man,
A gaze blank and pitiless as the sun,
Is moving its slow thighs, while all about it
Reel shadows of the indignant desert birds.
The darkness drops again; but now I know
That twenty centuries of stony sleep
Were vexed to nightmare by a rocking cradle,
And what rough beast, its hour come round at last,
Slouches towards Bethlehem to be born?
William Butler Yeats: The Second Coming
It’s a wonderful poem, resonant for the contemporary world and the cultural frictions we are experiencing. And re-evaluation of narrative in a no-holds barred analysis is, I think, the problematic but necessary way forward. Novelist Victor Hugo used the expression “an idea whose time has come”, and this is now contemporaneous: we have to re-evaluate what we’ve received from the past.
Narrative then, for me, is a sophisticated subject with philosophical dimensions and considerable repercussions. Narratology – its study – is an important and illuminating subject.
And apart from its undoubted photographic importance, because this is frequently how photography is used, it’s fun to arrange and re-arrange u>a growing collection of jazz photos, assembling and re-assembling its narrative import. I’m interested in three facets in my jazz project: jazz artists, the audience, and the intersection between the two as a component part of jazz culture.
Comment
I’m really impressed skoob, some really good work here. I’m glad you share it.
— Karen · Jan 30, 10:32 PM · §
Thanks K! and thanks for dropping by.
— James · Jan 31, 01:25 AM · §
Interesting article James. I’m increasingly becoming more interested in the concept of using a collection of images to convey a narrative, however I’m left wondering where the role of the single image narrative is – surely all images as a means of communication have an implicit if not explicit narrative?
Rgds,
Adam
— Adam · Nov 17, 09:59 PM · §
Yes I agree Adam, all images have some kind of narrative. I think how a collection of images differs is firstly the overall impact (it’s stronger and more comprehensive) and secondly how each individual image is supported by the others and may not be very strong in isolation.
In fact that’s quite likely – a documentary project covers, literally and otherwise, multiple viewpoints and different information that is mostly useful only as a composite whole.
This is very different to a photo ‘art’ approach where photographers work hard to create a single image that stands on its own terms.
You do get single documentary images with powerful impact, though they tend to rely on obvious or pre existing narratives concerning politics, humanitarian issues etc. In such cases, the ‘story’ being told already exists in one way or another even if it’s just a ‘theme’ or idea. A dramatic and famous image like the Vietnam girl running from napalm for example, raises the question: did the anti war narrative exist before that image appeared? Yes it did and in that respect all the image did was illustrate, rather than reveal something new (which is not to say it’s not a powerful process with impact and implications – the Vietnam shot undoubtedly catalysed anti war feeling – but that’s another matter).
I guess a single image is like a poem, or even a haiku, whereas a multiple image project is like a novel.
— James · Nov 18, 11:54 AM · §
Interesting ideas
— Georgie and Casey · Jun 22, 06:11 AM · §