Idetification.. . . .Carlos & Jason Sanchez . . . . 2007

Blog # 23

It started here. I was always enamoured of this photograph, it drew me in, invited me to see a story, the story.

What can we see? A mortuary, acidic and yet not quite clean. A place of bodies, now behind closed steel doors, concealing the reality of death. A place of despondency. A man grieving, despairing, we can assume that he has just received bad news. A woman consoling him, her hand compassionate in a gesture of charity. She has time for empathy, has the news had less effect on her ? Beyond, a functionary, a clerk, recording details? Recording details of death? She too may feel the stress and the tension here despite this being a regular occurrence and despite her professional armour.

For sure we see a revelation, something has just happened, we see the consequences and we feel the pain.

This is a single photograph with a limited number of elements yet it is so powerful. The story unequivocal and straightforward. We can see it in an instant. The magic of photography and the magic of a single image.

Carlos and Jason Sanchez are creators of stories. Their work is always planned, considered, constructed and manipulated. They build sets in their studio or modify existing locations, creating meticulous stagings, often imbued with a muscular sense of suspense. Their photographs condense story lines into a single key scene, frozen in time, allowing the viewer to become immersed and share in a complex single cinematic image.

There is no need to stop here of course, photographs can hold stories in many ways beyond the single image.

Grandpa Goes to Heaven . . . .Duane Michals . . . . 1989

Here a series of photographs made by Duane Michals. A work of imagination. A storytellers handiwork.

In still photographic frames we see movement, things happening as we look . We see emotion, a death again, but this time as celebration and not despair. We see a familiar place and an unfamiliar happenstance. In five simple frames we see a complex story so full of details. The bed, the room, the wallpaper, the boy, the grandad, the angel wings and the heavenly light beyond.

Try telling that story in words, how many words would you need ? See how immediate, how mercurial the photographic version is. Fleet of foot, expeditious, meteoric. The magic of photographs, the magic of a story in five frames.

Duane Michals is one of the great photographic innovators of the last century, widely known for his work with series, multiple exposures, and text. He first made significant, creative strides in the field of photography during the 1960s. His concerns are with the expansion and development of photographic storytelling. He worked on creating and manipulating the possibilities of the narrative, relying on sequences of multiple images appropriating cinema’s frame by frame format. For him the literal is less important than the communication of a concept or story.

We can expand further with more frames and look at the Photo Essay

The Country Doctor . . . . Eugene Smith . . . . 1948

The story is now more complex and extended over time with multiple characters and multiple locations. Now information becomes important; information as facts, as specifics. A different kind of storytelling. A storytelling of many images arranged in a very specific order to illuminate and witness the rhythms of a doctor’s life.

A range of photographs that tell a range of stories. We can now see deeper. We have stepped out of the mortuary with its single image, out of a bedroom with its five images and into a wider world with many images. The world of the doctor and his patients. We can begin to appreciate his skills, his empathy, his needs and his suffering. We can see where he works and how he works. We see his relations with those around him, those close to him and those that desperately need him.

We get to know our doctor.

Eugene Smith was an obsessive photographer, a perfectionist with a thorny personality. A genius. Almost single-handedly he developed and perfected the concept of the Photo Essay. Between 1948 and 1954 Smith photographed, for the USA Life magazine, a series of innovative photo essays with a strong humanist perspective. The Country Doctor essay was photographed in 1948 and is now recognised as the first extended editorial photo story.

The photo essay, with its many images, does indeed draw us in, availing us of understanding and appreciation. It engages us with its many ways of seeing the doctor and his work.

Then why stop there? Let’s increase the number of photos and call it a book. Not any old book of photographs, but a book that continues to tell stories, stories that are now panoramic, they make for the big picture.

The first of the story photo books is reputed to be The Americans by Robert Frank, which explored, in its own inimitable way, the soul of the USA. Let’s look however at a more recent photo story book, one that crash dives deep into what might be a foreign culture for many of us .

The Ballad of Sexual Dependancy . . . .Nan Goldin . .. ..1986

The Ballad of Sexual Dependency was Nan Goldin’s debut photo book. In 130 photographs she created a master work in which she casts friends, family and lovers as central characters in her strange and harrowing narrative. She showcases them with honesty and candour as they go about their daily lives. In bedrooms, bars and brothels, we catch glimpses of intimacy, melancholy, pleasure and ecstasy. She is photographing what she calls her tribe in memorable, personal and often hidden, moments.

The book was, and remains, a dramatic intervention in photographic storytelling with its unique visual language and . . . .

“would come to influence a generation of fledgling
photographers, who fell into her truth-telling wake.”

Lucy Davies, writing in The Telegraph 2014

Well I’m afraid that felt like a lecture, just missing the PowerPoint ! I didn’t mean it so. What I really am getting at is that photography nowadays is a playground. Its history shows a way forward and the digital world invites us in.

It’s time to have fun, be playful, mess around and experiment with our photographs. Throw them up in the air . . . not literally . . . and see what happens, see how they fall. If one photograph doesn’t make, it then try two, then three and then the world is your oyster and it may be a pearl.

But . . .remember, remember; . . . it’s the story that counts.

Encouraged, I have played around.