Photographic Narrative: Between Cinema and Novel
Photography is not what jumps to the minds of most people if you ask them what media they associate with storytelling. It carries with it a certain inferiority as a narrative form, at least compared to, say, film or literature. It is more readily associated with the single, self-contained object of fine art than with the creation of a sustained story. This is a problem, and as long as it lasts I think the audience of narrative photography will be limited. But I think the root cause of this lies not in the medium of photography per se, but in the accumulated effect of years of photography being used to tell stories in ways which it is not at all suited to.
Photographers have a vexed relationship with narrative. While we often describe ourselves as storytellers, the way we use and talk about narrative reveals common misunderstandings about how stories actually work. We too often assume the ability to tell stories is something innate and so ignore the need to develop these abilities and think about them methodically. We downplay the opportunities to learn lessons from other fields and assume we know all there is to know. We routinely celebrate examples of photographic storytelling which, when subjected to close scrutiny, turn out to have all the narrative complexity of a children’s fairy tale. On top of it all, we don’t think carefully or often enough about the narrative specificities of our medium.
Different media function in different ways, and because of this they also tell stories in different ways. An epic poem does not tell a story in the same way as a video game. Successful storytellers, in whatever medium, take account of the strengths and weaknesses of the tools at their disposal and temper the urge to emulate traits of other media with a recognition and understanding of the narrative techniques their medium can support. A central element of the Soviet filmmaker Andrei Tarkovsky’s approach to directing, for example, was to reject literary pretensions in his film scripts and artistic symbolism in his imagery, and to instead make films that as far as possible played to the very specific qualities of cinema. The result was a string of original, powerful films.
I think we would benefit greatly by doing something similar with photography, and a starting point for this is to be much more candid about the areas where, at least in narrative terms, photography is strong and weak. One evident narrative strength is its sheer power of description. A single photograph can depict a scene with a verisimilitude which pages of written account would still fail to capture. It is this quality which led photography to be first employed for practices like crime scene photography, in place of the unreliable memory and incomplete notes that had previously been relied upon. At the same time as acknowledging where it is strong, we must recognise that photography has many weaknesses, perhaps most noticeably that is a very poor explainer or exponent of things. An idea which can be easily encapsulated in a dozen words might remain ambiguous and unclear even when we have an unlimited number of photographs with which to explain it. As Bertolt Brecht wrote, a photograph of a factory tells us what a factory looks like, but it tells us very little about the relationships that underlie it. This problem only becomes more acute in our present circumstances, a world of hidden and complex networks of information and power.
Identifying photography’s strengths and weaknesses in isolation is a starting point, but even this will only take us so far. The problem with speaking of what is strong and weak about photography is that it overlooks the extent to which it is medium with very diverse and different uses, one which finds its ultimate resting place in many diverse places, from the gallery and the book, to multimedia and augmented realities. What is weak in one setting may well be strong in another, and for example the power of description might at times overwhelm the narrative that it should instead sustain and support. To really start to identify the subtle things that photography can and can’t do, we might benefit by comparing it to other media, and use these comparisons to triangulate some of the subtle ways that photography can work to construct narrative.
Roland Barthes is famous (or perhaps infamous) to photographers for his 1980 book Camera Lucida, now standard fare on the reading lists of most photography courses. But alongside his contributions to thought about photography, Barthes was also enormously important in the field of narratology, the theory of narrative. Somewhere amongst his books I once encountered a sentence where he characterised photographs as things which were somewhere ‘between cinema and novel’ a suggestion which struck me at the time and has lingered ever since despite my failure to relocate the precise text. This deceptively simple description somehow cuts to the heart of what makes photography an interesting narrative medium, and it has been something that for a long time I have wanted to return to and unpack, by comparing these media and drawing out a few of the more obvious similarities.
What traits might photography share with cinema then? As two media sharing a common technological lineage, the comparison is perhaps quite clear and the similarities and differences relatively straightforward to determine.
- Firstly, and most clearly, both photography and cinema share a direct, mechanical, and apparently unmediated relationship with reality. This allows us to do many things, like generate the inhuman levels of description discussed before. At the same time, that detail can be dialed down through reductive techniques to almost nothing, converting a scene to the most minimal details of light and dark, or using shallow focus to blur all but the most critical details.
- Secondly, and related to the above, both mediums are comparatively ‘transparent’ and by this I mean they can employ techniques which even a knowledgeable audience are less likely to recognise as they are sucked into the narrative being created. An example of this is the ability to position audiences into a very particular viewpoint or perspective, without thought about how or why that perspective is the one they are viewing through. That idea of photography (and cinema) as windows on the world, remains strong however much we might resist or dismiss it.
- Thirdly, in both cinema and in photography the gaps between the elements that form the narrative are where much of the narrative meaning is created. This is again important in relation to the direct visual relationship to reality that these media make it possible to create stark, visceral visual juxtapositions and contrasts. Such contrasts of course exist in words as well, but seldom with the same power, and perhaps they are less vital because language allows expression of abstract concepts which visually can only be conjured through such contrasts.
It may help to apply some of these examples to a specific film in order to consider how they work. A good one might be Chris Marker’s 1962 featurette La Jetee. Viewable in its entirety online, La Jetee is a short science fiction film about time travel in the aftermath of a third world war which has laid waste to the surface and left the survivors living underground. What makes La Jetee interesting for the purposes of this discussion, though, is that while in editing terms it uses the language of cinema to construct its narrative effect, it is composed entirely of still images. La Jetee illustrates many of the qualities just discussed, from the featureless dark of the underground caverns of future Paris, to the intensely detailed views across the ruined city, and the juxtaposition of destroyed buildings with the spire of the Eiffel Tower.
What about the novel, though? Here, the similarities might seem harder to grasp because they become less about the storytelling medium itself and much more about the ways that viewers or readers traverse and unfold the narrative.
- Firstly, and again most clearly, photographs and literature both lack the possibility of fully controlling the reader’s journey through the narrative. Unlike in cinema, which affords total control over timing, in the context of novel or photograph we must relinquish much more trust and responsbility to the viewer, and accept the fact they might choose to begin halfway through our narrative, or to jump back and revisit an earlier section at any point. Where the film director can employ total control of order and timing (playing the audience like an instrument as Hitchcock called it), the novelist has such no control, and the photographer does in only a few circumstances, like in the use of multimedia narratives.
- Secondly, photography and literature share in the importance of the paratext in amplifying the effects of narrative. Gerard Genette, who coined the term, described paratexts as those things which contribute to the narrative, without actually being part of it. He had in mind in particular those things added by people besides the author, but I think it can be usefully expanded beyond this. To take the example of a photobook, the materials, the size and scale of it, the graphic design of it, all of these features can in subtle ways heighten the emotional or intellectual impact of a narrative. Few novelists take advantage of these things to a great degree, but those that do (usually those derisively branded ‘experimental’ like the British novelist B.S Johnson) show what possibilities that paratext holds for amplifying narrative intent.
- Thirdly, portability, and in particular the fact that photography and novel are consumed in many unpredictable spaces. For much of its history, perhaps until the invention of television, cinema existed mostly within a specialised and controlled space of the movie theatre, designed to minimise distraction and direct attention to the work on display. Photography and novel by contrast have few such dedicated environments (except perhaps the rarefied ones of the gallery, or the library) and instead are prone to the pollution of the environments in which they are encountered and consumed. But narratively this could also be an intentional device, where audiences are directed to experience a work in a particular setting, chosen to connect with aspects of narrative..
Again, in considering some of these things it may help to relate to a specific example. I’d suggest W.G. Sebald’s 2001 novel Austerlitz, which recounts the story of a man slowly uncovering a personal history lost during the Second World War. Like Marker’s La Jetee, Sebald’s Austerlitz makes interesting use of photographs, which are scattered amongst the text, and sit embedded in it, uncaptioned and for the most part not directly referred to, but quietly resonating with Sebald’s words in indirect, glancing ways.
These comparisons are neither complete, nor perfect. They are more an attempt to illustrate the value of asking what photography shares with other mediums, and from here determining those ways in which it diverges. It should go without saying that the narrative possibilities of photography are much more than just what it has in common or difference with novel and cinema.
Put another way, photography is much more than what it is not.
