The Photographer's Story: The Art of Visual Narrative

398 Pages·2012·22.88 MB·English

by  Michael Freeman

MICHAEL FREEMAN
THE PHOTOGRAPHER’S STORY
The Art of Visual Narrative
I L E X
CONTENTS
INTRODUCTION
I. THE PHOTO ESSAY
1. Narrative
Story structure
The classic narrative formula
Three + one
Rhythm & pacing
2. Pictures & Words
What photographs can & cannot do
Captions help pictures
3. Case History: Country Doctor
Theme & agenda
The preparation & planning
The shooting
The layout
Key shots
How the layout makes the argument
4. What Makes a Story
Worthy subjects
Scope
Story in a single picture
Variety or consistency
II. PLANNING & SHOOTING
1. Kinds of Story
People stories
Location stories
“Making-of” stories
Commodity stories
Activity stories
Collection stories
Institution stories
Concept stories
2. THEME & AGENDA
3. The Picture Script
Events
Locations
Setups
Activities
People
Add-ons
4. Improvise
III. EDIT & SHOW
1. The Photographer’s Edit
How to edit a take
Comparing the edit to the shoot
What I thought I was shooting
How it looked in the edit
Editing an entire story
2. Fitting the Agenda
3. The Designer’s Edit
In & out of sequence
Pictorial essays
4. Layouts in Space & Time
Falconry story, comparing
Pairing, comparing
5. The Big Story
6. Online & Linear
Slideshows
Reworking a story for the web
Sequence means succession
Animating the still image
Click-through or movie
Audio & video
Putting it all together
Production values
Tablets
Index
Picture Credits & Bibliography
INTRODUCTION
It took the explosion of photography into all its many modern forms to make
me realize that what I had been doing most of the time was storytelling. Not all
of the time—there were cover shots and single-image jobs—but mostly I did
stories. At the time I didn’t articulate it quite like that, nor, as I remember, did
anyone else I knew. It was simply what we did, or aspired to do. Most of my life in
photography has been on assignment, and most of these assignments were of a
length that allowed us to move around the subject, show it in different ways, and
describe it visually. Some were short, some long. They ranged from a day (not
many of those) to a few months (quite a number of those—strangely, perhaps,
but a consequence of my enjoyment of long projects).
Naturally, then, this is the kind of shooting that I’ve been closest to, but it’s
only recently that I’ve noticed colleagues actually saying things like “I’m a
storyteller with a camera.” It’s only recently that I’ve started saying this. The
reason has to do with the changes in photography. Photo stories, picture stories,
whatever you like to call them, were really part of magazine assignment culture.
It’s what magazines like Life, National Geographic, GEO, Smithsonian, Paris
Match, Epoca were all about. That world isn’t dead by any means, but it doesn’t
exercise the hold on public attention that it once did. Print, loving it though I do,
is at the start of a long, slow decline—which may sound odd, given that this book
is very much print; but by slow I mean very slow. In any case, the writing is on
the wall: The screen is taking over.
The result is that the old hierarchical way of doing things is disappearing, and
being replaced by a more independent world in which people do photography in
pretty much whatever way they like—and with so many millions at it there’s a
sizable support group for every interest, from iPhoneography to expressive,
humanitarian, or collaborative photography. Invention continues happily, and it
simply makes definition a little more necessary. One kind of photography that is
redefining itself is storytelling, which for many of us is the classic, essential, and
pure form of photography. There’s an entirely understandable new interest
among new photographers in directing energy towards making a coherent body
of work. And few things in photography are more coherent than a well executed
story. This is what this book is about.
There’s a new world of self-assignment. It doesn’t have the financial support
that kept professional editorial photographers going, but it’s possible and it offers
a new freedom—to choose what to shoot and to do it entirely in the way you
want. These may not be great days for many professional photographers, or for
picture editors, but for everyone else the world of photo essays and all the other
forms of narrative and storytelling through pictures is at last open to all.
PART 1
THE PHOTO ESSAY
The term photo essay, which now seems a natural fit, was an invention not
without a little pretension. It first appeared in a Life advertisement for itself in
1937, promoting the photographic story as an advanced form that went way
beyond a simple collection of pictures. It claimed that the camera “can picture
the world as a seventeenth-century essayist or a 20th-century columnist would
picture it,” concluding that the sample story shown, by Alfred Eisenstaedt on
Vassar, “gives an impression of that college as personal and homogeneous as any
thousand words by Joseph Addison.” That was aiming high, indeed.
Life may have pioneered the form more single-mindedly than other magazines,
but it was by no means the only vehicle for this kind of photography. In the key
years of the 1930s, 1940s, and 1950s, other illustrated magazines included Look in
the US (launched 1937), Picture Post in the UK (1938), Paris Match in France
(1949), and Epoca in Italy (1950). The stimulus, as we’ll see, came first from a
novel kind of fast, candid photography that new cameras made possible, and then
from a handful of pioneering illustrated magazines in Germany. Publishers on
both sides of the Atlantic realized by the mid-1930s that there was a huge public
appetite for seeing world events in photographs. More than this, the editors saw
the opportunity to create a new form of publishing over which they could have
strong, but subtle, control—sequences of images that added up to much more
editorially than the individual pictures. With judicious selection and layout, a
group of photographs could be turned into a coherent story. This also put more
control into the hands of the editorial team—an attractive idea for them, though
it introduced a never-ending conflict between photographers and editors.
Photographers usually want better and bigger treatment for their favorite images,
while editors and designers want the photographs to serve their layouts better.
There is a subtle distinction between picture story and photo essay. In the
former, photographs can be harvested from many sources, which in theory makes
it possible to run a very high visual standard, and to have a visually varied effect.
It also puts control firmly in the hands of the picture editor. The term photo
essay, however, implies a single vision and the work of one photographer
shooting in a consistent style. Variety, in the form of a compiled picture story—
very common in travel magazines—can produce a visual surfeit if not handled
with some sensitivity and restraint. For example, several highly chromatic images
from different hands, but shown all together, are likely to look garish.
Photographers, understandably enough, have always pushed for authorship