Narrative Photography - MMc401.1

The definition of a narrative is a spoken or written account of connected events, therefore a story.

The definition for photography is the art or practice of taking and processing photographs, we use photographs to capture moments, every moment is unique and will not happen the exact same again. This is why people use photography for nostalgic purposes as they can remember, re-feel and re-live these moments.

Narrative photography is the idea that a story can be told through a sequence of photographs in a particular way. These photographs are usually in chronological order as they can show events in the order they were taken to re-create the happenings of a real event.

In this sequence of photographs below we can see a man doing the long jump from two different angles, the use of taking photographs quickly one after another shows the finer detail of  the jump, which from the human eye we cannot see as it happens all too fast.

There is a competition for narrative photography in Portland, the following quote describes the concept -

"The power of narrative or story telling is at the foundation of much of photography. Photographers are creating complex and descriptive moments in time. Contemporary photographers are crafting and documenting new forms of a visual short story."

This basically means that a range of photographs can be the perfect way to tell a story and can be crafted (in some cases modified) to show a narrative better than it could be told.

Narrative within photography is related to the idea of context. Photographs can appear full or empty because it is the product of including and excluding elements. This is what constructing an image or photo is all about, understanding of context is imperative to knowing what is best to be either included or excluded in a photograph. The understanding of context requires visual storytellers to be exceedingly skillful researchers.

Stuart Freedman said, we need “a return to a storytelling in photography as rigorous in thought and research as it is beautiful in construction and execution.”

Structuring narratives can be done in many ways, usually a common form of narrative is linear. This is a story with a beginning, middle and end, a story arc along which elements of a narrative run and strong characters.

In the picture below we can see that the sequence of photographs follows this linear narrative and is executed well as we can tell that the sequence is implying to be more in touch with nature, we can see this because of the trees appearing

and their clothes disappearing.

For my narrative photography project I asked myself “What is the story I want to tell?” As I was travelling to Amsterdam for the weekend I decided to capture the journey and create a visual story to show what its like to be in a different country for a few days.

At first my idea was to create almost a storyboard of images with myself in every image with a different background in each, however thinking about how there is many attractions in the city is I decided I would incorporate images of the city sights and some of the activities I partook in whilst I was there.