Narrativity

The question as to whether or not photographs can work as narratives is explored in John Szarkowski's "The Photographer's Eye", Clement Greenberg's "Four Photographers", and Charlotte Cotton's "The Photograph as Contemporary Art: Chapter 2, Once Upon A Time".

Szarkowski begins by describing photography as a new art, something completely separate from painting, and therefore needing to find a different way to express its meaning. The field of this new art, from the beginning, was chock-full of experimenters, amateurs, and hobbyists. As time went on, the medium became increasingly cheaper and easier to use. This opened the door for even more people to get their hands on; people from all parts of society and all ages. Where painting was done for specific purposes and was thought out and planned well ahead of time so as to make the most of the expensive resources required to create the painted work of art, photography was taken on the fly. People would photograph store fronts, people, objects, window views, etc, without concern for reason or composition.In fact, the only thing that really tied all of these photographs together was the pure fact that they were photographs. Each image was photographic and that is all they had in common.

Szarkowski brings up five points of discussion, dealing mostly with early photography but still relevant today: The Thing Itself, The Detail, The Frame, Time, and Vantage Point. As a "thing", photography was seen to be "the real". Everything caught through the lens of a camera was 100% real because it could not be created by hand. However, there was a slight misunderstanding when it came to using the word "real" (or actual). Reality is real life. It certainly is what sits in front of the camera lens, but once the image of what is in front of the lens is captured onto film, there is no reality in that image. It is a static documentation of the real, definitely, but it is simply an image. Szarkowski's strongest point in arguing that photography cannot be a narrative, comes in his section about detail. Photography became about small, fragmented pieces of a story, found and maybe attempted to be pieced together, but not a story in and of itself. Photographs therefore become symbols, pieces of information we can create relations to based upon our knowledge of the world in relation to each specific photograph. As for the frame, the photographer can choose to create relationships between shapes, people, and events within a single frame of an image that were never there in real life. Szarkowski uses the example of two people walking in a crowd, but the photographer framing the picture so only the two people can be seen. The viewer then sees a relationship between these two people who probably didn't even notice each other on the sidewalk. I found it slightly curious, that through the argument of photography as not-narrative, Szarkowski throws in this quote, "The photographer looked at the world as though it were a scroll painting, unrolled from hand to hand exhibiting an infinite number of croppings - of compositions - as the frame moved onwards." I am still very torn as to whether this would suggest narrative or not. If one was to take a scroll painting, and read it from end to end, it would either be of a large scene with many doing their own things (such as Rejlander's attempt at negative piecing)

or the same people progressing in an action throughout the scroll (similar to some Egyptian wall art which I cannot find a photo for, where the same few people/gods are shown on their way to see a pharaoh, maybe walking, then crossing a river, etc). At first I saw this as a narrative, pictures depicting a story (a very slow framed movie, perhaps). However, because it would be viewed from end to end slowly and with attention to details in between, I guess it would be non-narrative in that the actions of these people are merely represented by their frozen forms. Though we can deduce that they may move from one place to the next, we don't actually see this movement. Time is the next "issue". All photographs are in the present. Whatever was captured by the camera at the time of the shutter being released was what was happening for that split/multiple second exposure. It does not show what had happened 5 minutes ago, nor does it have the capability to show what happens 5 minutes after. Photographs can alluded to the past or present, however, but they are simply the immobilization of time. The last point was vantage point, but I didn't see this really relating much to the discussion about narrativity.

Clement Greenberg starts off his writing with "The photograph has to tell a story if it is to work as art". Wow. Very strong statement. However, he does not seem to back up such statements with much evidence. He gives an example of a photograph (which I also cannot find) that he would considered narrative. The photograph is Edward Steichen's at the Acropolis. A woman's arms extend above a stone parapet in the foreground, and in the background is the Porch of Erechthyum, created with columns shaped as women. This contrast between actual flesh and stone carved flesh, Greenberg believes, is what makes this story of "life versus trimmed and carved stone" and that this has force and a message. Personally, I would say that a story does not exist here, but that the symbol of this message does. Of course it is a direct comparison, whether intentional or not (part of the joys of photography), of stone versus life, but that is all the photograph does for us.

Charlotte Cotton also believes in the narrativity in photographs. One of her first examples is Jeff Wall's piece Insomnia.

Cotton believes that this photograph is narrative in style because "The layout of the interior acts as a set of clues to the events that could have led up to this moment..." in which she counteracts her statement of the photograph as a narrative. She points out that the open cabinets, moved about chairs and table, and the man laying on the floor "act as a set of clues" (not "show the man doing these things") "to the events that could have led up to this moment". She is admitting that this photograph is simply a moment, not a series of moments. Sure, the room is messed up and we can imagine that this man did those things, but nothing is directly telling us that. Somebody else may have come through and done these things and the man is now laying terrified on the floor. Maybe there was a storm and things got banged around and he is now taking some sort of refuge under the table. Granted, the title of the pieces is "Insomnia", but this gives context only to the fact that this man is not asleep. All we know for fact, is that the cabinets are open, the furniture is moved around, and the man is on the ground. This photograph does not actually show anything more than that, we simply imagine more. Cotton even says this: "These pictures encourage a  kind of storytelling in the viewer's mind." The pictures encourage this storytelling out of the image, not within its frame.

When I first started these readings, I had the mindset that photographs could for sure tell a story. Of course I had heard some arguments that photographs could not be narrative, but it didn't seem to make much sense to me until these readings. First off, I'd like to define narrative. According to the OED, narrative is "the practice or art of narration or story-telling". The definition of "tell" is "To make known by speech or writing; to utter words; to say; to speak; to express in words". This would all lead toward photography not being capable of being a narrative. There are no words in photography unless placed alongside an image, and in that case, the words are narrative, the pictures are not. They would simply be a representation of those words, without which, the meaning would not be fully clear and would be open to interpretation. However, the OED does also define narrative as "Art. Representing a story through the medium of painting or similar art forms." I am curious as to when this definition of narrative arose. I don't even know where to begin looking for that, but I really hope it did not become part of the discussion of art after photography was invented. Anyway, I know I spewed much of my argument for photography as non-narrative in the above paragraphs, but I'll quickly recap. Photographs are representations of the real. All we know when looking at a single photograph is that when this photograph was taken, that is what was happening within the frame. Sarah Dobai's photograph Red Room

shows us that this woman is laying on top of this man and that her hair is covering part of their faces and she is wearing a shirt and the man is naked and they are on a blanket covered loveseat in a red room. Sure, I can infer that before this maybe they had dinner at a restaurant and then came home and were involved in sexual activity, resulting in the stripping down of clothing, up to the point where this photograph is taken, and that afterward they may go brush their teeth and read a book before falling asleep in bed together. However, everything I just said after "red room." is purely made up. Maybe it's inference, but maybe I am 100% completely off and maybe she's a stripper, or this is adultery, or these two people have snuck off on a school trip somewhere to be together. Your guess is as good as mine and the photograph tells us nothing except they are, at this moment, right now, in that position on that couch in that red room. Even photographs as a series, one after the other, potentially showing somebody in their car, then in their driveway, then in their front entryway, then in their kitchen, tells me nothing except the fact that these photographs were chosen to be placed in this order of car, driveway, doorway, kitchen, and these photographs may have been taken each a year apart from each other. Maybe they were taken days apart, and the woman one day was in her car, and the next day took the bus home and is walking up her driveway, and the next day walked through the front door and right upstairs, and the next day, came through the back door and into the kitchen. Maybe she chose to wear the same clothes for each of these photographs. Each photo stands alone. It shows is small piece of time and that is all it is capable of doing. It cannot show us what happened before or after, though it can lead us on to imagining what had happened, and even then, we may only know this because of context we picked up in Sunday School when we were 8, or through some classic literary piece we had to read when we were 15. Without written narrative, or spoken, photographs would fail as story-tellers because of their ambiguity and lack of being able to show more than just one, very, very small piece of time or event.