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Photography and narrative: What is involved in telling a story? In telling visual stories about the world, photography is narrating the world. Of course, narrative is something that is far larger than photography. Social communication is one of the defining characteristics of being human, and narrative stories have long been a common and powerful mode for transmitting information. As such, there is much we can learn from the likes of anthropology, history and literary theory.
Here I want to lay out some of the points I discussed yesterday in a lecture to Jonathan Worth’s innovative class on photography and narrative at Coventry (you can listen to the lecture via the #Phonar site – it draws on recent presentations to the IOPF multimedia workshop in Changsha and the MA/International Multimedia Journalism program in Beijing).
A narrative is an account of connected events. To think about narrative, however, involves more than reflecting on how a series of events become connected. We also need to think about how something is constituted as an event in the first place. Events are not found objects waiting to be discovered. As Allen Feldman has stated “the event is not what happens. The event is that which can be narrated” (p. 14).
This means a narrative constructs the very events it connects. For example, when people stormed the Bastille on 14 July 1789, they did not understand themselves to be taking part in the first day of an event already known as ‘the French Revolution’. The idea of the French Revolution was the product of historical and political narratives looking back on particular happenings, connecting them in specific ways.
Narratives are not found objects either. They have to be constructed by participants and observers, actors and analysts. Recognising narratives as constructions does not mean anything goes or that anybody can make anything up. It does mean that we cannot escape the clash of interpretations, and that simple-minded appeals to ‘the
Here I want to lay out some of the points I discussed yesterday in a lecture to Jonathan Worth’s innovative class on photography and narrative at Coventry (you can listen to the lecture via the #Phonar site – it draws on recent presentations to the IOPF multimedia workshop in Changsha and the MA/International Multimedia Journalism program in Beijing).
A narrative is an account of connected events. To think about narrative, however, involves more than reflecting on how a series of events become connected. We also need to think about how something is constituted as an event in the first place. Events are not found objects waiting to be discovered. As Allen Feldman has stated “the event is not what happens. The event is that which can be narrated” (p. 14).
This means a narrative constructs the very events it connects. For example, when people stormed the Bastille on 14 July 1789, they did not understand themselves to be taking part in the first day of an event already known as ‘the French Revolution’. The idea of the French Revolution was the product of historical and political narratives looking back on particular happenings, connecting them in specific ways.
Narratives are not found objects either. They have to be constructed by participants and observers, actors and analysts. Recognising narratives as constructions does not mean anything goes or that anybody can make anything up. It does mean that we cannot escape the clash of interpretations, and that simple-minded appeals to ‘the