Personal Blogs

How can multiple photographs construct a narrative that shapes our understanding of the subject matter?

Images that are juxtaposed and/or sequenced invite narrative interpretation and may suppress some of the issues connected to their relative emplacement. This can be observed even in the most ‘amateur’ arrangements, where both common ideas about the ‘subject of the photographs (perhaps ‘myself’) are conflated with selection of episodes from the life and/or images that comment upon that life, as in the example from ‘unknown photographer’ in MoMA gifted by P. Cohen.

The elements that vary the story and its emphases are also seen (more consciously intended perhaps) in art photography such as Albers storyboard on Oscar Schlemmer. The setting may range from a page or sheet of paper to a wall (Tillmans) to a book and so on. These too change meanings. Is an ‘album’ neutral? The variants include (episode refers to one photograph):

·        Relative size of the episodes;

·        Placing of episodes – top, bottom, left, right, centre, marginal, orientation of photographs (none of the examples use slanting), alignment vertically and horizontally, size of relative spaces between episodes,

·        Commonalities in episodes (Walid Raad)

·        Role of writing/text on or around images (or on back of cp. Japanese photographic postcards during Meiji period), role of multimodal images – cartoons. Including captions in museum pieces (Fletcher photographs of museum photos in Vietnam placed in USA museums). The test-case of ‘removed’ text (Willis Thomas Unbranded)

·        Number of subjects in episode. Are these animal, human, mechanical pieces, tools etc. or mixed?

·        Identifiability of background in episode – especially if no figures.

·        Disjunctions between image technique (as in Harry Callahan’s Eleanor)

·        Use of colouration – homogenous or not for a set of episodes (Mae Weems).

·        Role of fictional or roleplay elements in creation of characters (Cindy Sherman) or setting (Demand Room)

How do choices concerning the presentation of a photograph or series of photographs influence its meaning?

We could look at all of the above. What happens in each is made up complex interactions between contexts at different levels of the understanding of that word. This includes interactions between space, boundaries and other modalities of representation, including architectural ones but also the occult meanings of alignment against disorder in arrangement. All of these relationships carry unstable codes of meaning. Their instability means that the meaning received from the images in contexts may be planned but not necessarily determinative on what the images mean to the viewer. Will Sherman’s female types mean the same across all audiences irrespective of gender, ethnicity, class etc.?

The obviousness of the use of artifice (more obvious in Callahan than Demand - since in the latter we may have to search or accidentally alight on cues of such manipulations whereas double exposures in the former are obvious artifice).

The influence on meanings (I’d insist on the plural here) is not only unstable, it is also a means of linking narrative images to the aims of art in form and content, especially where our responses requires us to tap into multi-modal contexts (the meaning of advertisements, film stills, headline banners or script). I don’t feel you can be dogmatic here about effects except in that it inspires exchanges about meaning in its audiences.

One important effect however is, perhaps because of the above, to challenge stereotypical narratives about the lives of the socially marginalised or disempowered. This week they have been about ethnicity, ‘race’ and gender but sexual orientation, class and different embodiments are also implied.