Menu
By now, we know the purpose of story is to confront our internal worldviews with the world through the external struggles of characters (episode 1). We know how stories are told to keep our attention high from beginning to end (episode 2). Let’s now examine how photographs and films / video go about this in their own different ways.
Before we can get into answering the initial question, I need to address two final theoretical points relating to our handling perception and causality.
It’s easy to imagine that perception follows a one way path : photons enter our eyes, hit the retina, electrical signals travel along our nerves to our brain, where patterns are recognized and the scene is interpreted. The end.
But that’s only one part of the story.
For one thing, our brain is selective. The cocktail effect is when you stand in a busy room, managing to focus on one conversation to the exclusion of the many concurrent others and, suddenly, someone three tables away says something that triggers your attention and shifts your focus away. Your mind has been constantly monitoring other conversation but bringing only one to your awareness. Similarly, you can focus on moving balls and not see the gorilla in the room …
And secondly, the brain brings prior experience to the perception process. You can understand words written with lots of missing letters because you’ve seen the words before. You can recognise a spoken sentence with the sound artificially distorted, but only if you’ve heard it non-distorted before. The brain knows what to expect and while listening to the distorted version, you still hear the clear sentence in your mind, which you couldn’t seconds earlier, before hearing the undistorted version. And when you know there is a gorilla in the video, it’s impossible to not see it anymore. If I spoiled it for you, here is another chance to test yourself through this whodunnit or this cup trick đ
Of course, this selectivity and bias in perception extend to interpretation and worldview, that principal fuel for storytelling. The stronger your wordlviews, the more you react to stories. A playful child will see a happy puppy in the photograph above. A busy parent will see a dirty carpet in the making đ
Imagine someone told you; “Voldemort and Harry duel, (kinda) die and Harry gets thrown back into life after a while in limbo”. Would you want to read the previous 7 tomes after that? We hate spoilers before movies, or being told the result of the football match before we can watch it.
To tell an effective story, ie one that is able to impact the reader/viewer, the author needs to provide enough clues to create a setting and a context, but leave out enough for the audience to have to ask themselves what is happening.
A totally abstract photograph might be pleasing to view, but it will struggle to capture the viewer’s attention for very long. Unless the photograph is incredible as an object, and the viewer asks “how on Earth did he/she do that?” But that is technical mastery, not storytelling. In the photograph above, the larger, distorted reflection of a man appears to be looking, shocked, at a couple of girls sitting next to a wall.
There’s nothing mysterious there, but the composition clearly opposes the two groups and makes us wonder why the guy looks so appalled. Shouldn’t they be sitting, in this room? Are they touching something the sign says not to touch? Is he looking at something else beyond them, out of the frame? It’s not a life altering story, but it makes you stop and ask yourself what is happening because you have enough clues to care – and because your mind automatically infers a cause relationship between the two main visual elements – but you don’t have the answer.
So, interesting photographs can be created by showing evidence of a fact but not revealing its causes. Anytime the viewer is interested enough to ask âwhat am I seeingâ or âwhy is this happeningâ, thatâs a win. The more interest you can create to make the viewer want to understand, and the less you reveal, the more tension and interest you create, letting the viewer fill in the blanks according to their prior experience and viewpoint.
In a movie, the photograph below could be a scene about our heroâs backstory as a skater. As a photograph, it is rather flat and boring. Itâs a skater. Thatâs it. No questions come to mind. No storytelling here. Until you notice the man in the back. Then, the photograph somehow comes alive.
And this, below, might be considered mysterious by some, but no one really cares. Itâs too out there (clueless) for anyone to really care enough to try to understand. The same is true of a purely abstract photograph above. It might be interesting to some, but wouldnât qualify as a storytelling image. Itâs a fine line with no definite rules to rely on. Experience and intuition are good guides here.
Duration is main difference between photography and film. While the interesting causality gap happens between elements of a frame in a photograph, it is editing that makes the most use of this in filmmaking.
The very first films consisted of single sequences such as a train entering the station in La Ciotat. Beyond the initial amazement at moving images, this soon became boring and the very inventors of the process deemed it without future.
But filmmakers soon realized that stitching together two shots created an automatic causal link between the two in the viewer’s mind. For instance, seeing a house and cutting to a shot inside the kitchen, the viewer automatically inferred that the kitchen was inside the house previously seen. Obvious now, but an absolute breakthrough at the time. Taking this to a new level, Kuleshov proposed an experiment in which an expressionless actor is shown for a few seconds in between shots of a bowl of soup, a child in a coffin, a pretty woman (see video here) … Although the exact same footage of the actor was used in every case, the audience ascribed different feelings and moods to him and lauded the excellent acting.
You can use a similar âfill in the blanksâ approach to bring back memories in the viewer’s mind. The stronger the memory the better. There is no causality here, only evocation.
Here, we see the sun shining on my wife through a plane window. Weâve all been on planes. We can all relate to this sort of memory. And the photograph brings us back to a pre-Covid pre-Greta world in which air travel wasnât considered dangerous or an act of eco-terrorism. Happy days.
And how about this? Remember summer? Remember getting real close to people, close enough to touch their skin, and no masks?
Similarly, pareidolia (which we did a challenge on) is a way of stirring thoughts and emotions by photographing objects that evoke human face/behaviour.
And, below, the gentle light on the organic looking building evokes a peaceful evening in a civilised place.
You can question whether evoking something in the viewer’s mind is storytelling. To me, it isn’t really. But it can be a strong constituent of storytelling in a photo series or in a film, by creating a mood and prepping the mind to react to further images in a predetermined way.
Composition is photography’s main storytelling tool.
Choosing a frame format already sets the tone. And that format imposes a natural resting eye position within the frame. Any departure from that natural position begs the question “why?” , which is the start of a visual story.
In the photograph above, the woman is placed along the center of the frame, as the frame dictates. Her lit face and the direction of her gaze, towards the light, are what start the story here : “What is she looking at? Why is she kneeling? What is that light?” The answers are much less story worthy: the light is the entrance of the museum, she is looking at her phone, and she must have been in a hurry, so didn’t sit đ In fact, the story ends as soon as you notice her phone. There is no interrogation about what is happening anymore.
But below, the character is offset to the left, along the fabled rule of third principle. The first, subconscious, question is “Why is she not in the center?”
Composition is the balancing of the various visual components of a photograph. Balancing with respect to the natural center of the frame, and with respect to one another.
The visual attraction (or repulsion) of each component acts like a weight acting at a certain distance from the fulcrum that is the natural center (line or point) of the frame. If the weights all neutralize one another, like kids of equal weight on a see-saw, then the photograph is balanced. If not, it is imbalanced. Those options, obviously, are crucial to storytelling.
The photograph above is balanced because the strong weight of the sharp human figure (anything human, particularly faces, creates great weight) is much closer to the center than the hazy mountain in the background. The photographs feels quiet. It could be an ad for nostalgia đ In reality it is a woman freezing and waiting for breakfast while her husband insists on taking pictures early in the cold morning đ
This photograph is also balanced, but the dynamic story is more slightly elaborate than the previous ones. The first group, large and sharp, are collectively close to the center of the frame. But the less weighty second group and very strong leading line convergence sit a bit further out. Global balance is established, and there is little tension, but a regular eye movement from one group to the other and back. The main story is played in the foreground duo: what is happening? There’s obviously a tripod, so probably a camera. Isn’t it working? Is it an elaborate view camera? …
All the visually obvious cues (size, luminance, contrast, human features …) and psychological cues (joy, anger, implied intention, …) give various elements a certain strength that draws the eye more or less, defining the order in which the viewer takes them in, and creating the visual story.
Compare the two main characters above to the two characters below, from Akira Kurosawa’s High and Low. Can you sense the opposition below, compared to the collaboration above ?
Which leads me to blocking, one of cinema’s main tools for storytelling. Blocking is moving image’s equivalent of composition. Because human beings and faces are the strongest visual elements you can use, actors are inevitably what we look at 99% of the time, in any given frame. So the way actors move in a scene and interact with objects on the set determines very accurately who we look at and when, allowing the filmmaker to guide the viewers in a predetermined fashion.
Akira Kurosawa and Steven Spielberg are two undisputed masters of the craft. Typically, frame composition is very centric, yet Kurosawa often places his protagonist at the very edge of the frame, introduces new characters, making actors turn their back or get hidden behind something just long enough for us to switch to someone else, producing stunning frames that look like paintings joined by natural looking but carefully orchestrated ballets. It is mesmerizing dynamic composition that occasionally sits still to create a tableau and deliver a powerful message. Simply brilliant.
Can we do that without actors, simply by filming landscapes or non-orchestrated street scenes? No. I don’t think so. At least nowhere near as powerfully. Humans are interested mainly in humans. Faces and human (or divine đ ) interaction are what we seek the most.
Photographs without human looking figures can be striking, but there is little chance of strong storytelling if human condition isn’t at least implied in some way.
A landscape can set the mood for a story, it can provide a background for a story, but it doesn’t tell a story by itself, unless we can associate human activity to it. There is no story about trees, but there are human stories involving trees.
Consider these two photographs. The one on the left is mine, the one on the right is by grandmaster Henry Cartier Bresson. The two depict men jumping in a very similar position. And yet, they tell very different stories, stories we have no idea about and can only make up through the visual cues provided in the frame.
As explained above, the human mind loves to find causal relationships between events. It understands the world through cause and effect, a consequence of which is our love for murder mystery stories, detective stories, guessing games, ⌠Basically, we love to fill in the gaps. The clues on the left are sneakers (leisure), long shadows (morning or evening), zebra crossings (safety), a newspaper (safety) and a grocery bag (yum). This seems like someone jogging with the morning paper in hand. And we can guess at croissants in the bag. I can even taste them while thinking about them.
On the right, the clues are the water (flood), a ladder on the floor (not right), stone blocks and metal circles (unfinished work) industrial looking buildings that most French people will recognize as a train station (must be on time). And the off-balance stance of the man, who seems more rushed and perilous than the jogger on the left. Is he late for his train? Is he just trying not to get drenched or damage his shoes? He is on the right edge of the frame, looking blocked and hampered, while my jogger has room to breathe and run, creating less tension and drama.
Now, this is not an attempt to compare my photography to HCBâs 😉 This is merely an illustration that the best way to tell a story in a photograph is to leave a lot of information missing. It is when we try to fill in the blanks for ourselves that we engage with the story the most. Imagine a detective story that simply narrates the facts, all the facts. Who would read that? We want to figure it out for ourselves, that is why we read/view mystery stories.
Worldview is what photographers struggle the most with. Many people simply refuse to acknowledge that stories and worldviews are inseparable, that stories confront worldviews with reality.
So, what do you think about this scene ?
If the guy’s hungry enough to be begging, why does he have a dog, causing extra financial strain, and toys? Is he a parasite picking off busy workers as they rush to and from work? Or is he that person who never had a chance, from the moment he was borne and only has a dog a a couple of toys to keep him going through this hell while rich gits pass him by on their way to their warm homes and their cosy jobs?
The truth is: probably neither. But every viewer’s worldview will pin him to a specific role with absolute certainty without a second thought for the subjectivity of that act.
The less long the performance, the more beautiful the object has to be by itself. A photograph must hold on its own. Whereas no single frame in a 3 hours movie matters. It is the character arcs and the building of suspense leading to the climax that draw us in.
Togs will do anything to get rid of visual obstructions in a photograph but filmmakers will do anything for the opposite, as it adds layering and realism. The photographer typically strives for admiration of the finished object where the filmmaker aims for suspension of disbelief.
So, filmmakers have time on their side to follow one of the plotlines described in the previous episode. The quality of the photography plays a role in the success of the movie, but most award-winning Directors of Photography will tell you that they hold back and only create images that serve the story. Lesser DPs will try to impress with their artistic skill and will detract from the audience’s understanding of the story.
Finally, aesthetics obviously play a role in storytelling.
Long story short: photography strives for a pretty final object. While filmmakers create a believable universe, seeking any opportunity to create depth and control the light or any other element of the image that could grab the audience’s attention and pull them out of the story.
A separate mini series has been devoted to this topic, so this is all I will say here.
Photographers, on the other hand look for maximum impact in one frame. Either through beautiful printing (fine art), beautiful image making (composition, lighting, …) or striking subject (photojournalism, wildlife …) This impact can be one of admiration at a pretty scene or a reaction to disturbing content, or one one of puzzlement and desire to understand and find an explanation.
This is my only possible answer to the original question, then.
Film, through its ability to harness time, has more options to actually tell a story. But photographs have the ability to be more immediately impactful and to get the viewer to make up a story in their head, hence to start a story.
âNever miss a post
âLike what you are reading? Subscribe below and receive all posts in your inbox as they are published. Join the conversation with thousands of other creative photographers.
Session expired
Please log in again. The login page will open in a new tab. After logging in you can close it and return to this page.
“Remember getting real close to people, close enough to touch their skin . . . . ?” Hmm – – well with my past, I think it might be safer if I don’t answer that question. Except that it reminded me of a question someone asked on a quiz show on the TV this afternoon – “why is there a hole in the centre of a bundt cake?” Until that moment, it had never occurred to me to ask such a question – at the mention of a bundt cake, I merely wanted to know if it was an orange one. Ah well. This is supposed to be about photography, so I’ll move on.
Pascal, you analysis and exposition is so profound, so comprehensive, that I suspect you’re trying to work out which things around the house you can sell, to fund the purchase of a video camera.
I do agree with your analysis of the “left – large blank space – right” spacing of Kurosawa (or was that frame Spielberg’s?) It adds tension, and leaves the viewer floundering, trying to watch both actors at once.
And I love photos like the one of the lady at the entrance to the museum, or the motorbike, or the lady hunched over her tripod – where you can see everything EXCEPT the “centre of interest”, and you’re left speculating as to exactly what it might be.
Cartier Bresson’s is a classic for all sorts of reasons. I’ve seen it so often, with so many comments. Yet to date I haven’t seen any comments that have expressly focused on the fact that the “real” centre of interest is breaking ALL the rules – way outside the rule of thirs, and “good heavens – he’s running OUT of the frame”. Or MUCH more intriguing – how on EARTH did he manage to freeze the motion of this main subject of the photo? I shouldn’t ask that, because on of my great uncles managed to do it with a team of Clydesdales, ploughing a paddock – in the days of collodion wetplates. Intriguing – but of course we’ll never know, the culprit is long dead and cannot be asked.
Film or Photography? Which is best for storytelling?: This series seems to be an over-complication of a not complicated subject. I would say that the answer depends upon the story to be told and the depth of development the author wants to give it. As well as the reaction he/she wants from the viewer. It also depends quite a bit on where the author’s interests lie, film or photography.
If the author is only interested in framed photography then obviously that is the way he is going to try to tell the story. Same for film. If the author has spent his life thus far developing his/her skills and techniques in film production or framed art photography then that is probably the way he/she is going to tell the story.
Just this week I saw the apartment building pictured above. It was featured in a TV production called How Did They Build It? It showed the architect planning the building and being closely involved in preparing each stage of this complicated structure, from pouring concrete to constructing walls. And it finished by relating how each apartment maintained privacy as well as a magnificent view. I feel sure I got more information and entertainment value from this in the film version than I would have from still photography.
However, I just do not need a video of the waterfall scene. I can look at the framed shot and admire the fine work the author did in composing and processing this image. I find it beautiful and very restful. On the other hand, the young lady standing in thin shorts viewing a distant mountain scene tells a complicated story and creates a strong feeling of tension. At first glimpse I saw that she was standing with her legs pressed together and hugging herself. I immediately realized that she was standing out there freezing her @$$ off for a view that was no more than just OK. Why was she doing it? What was her motivation? I kept expecting (wanting) her to turn around run back toward the photographer to get warm.
Different stories told different ways and all well done.
I watch several bird photography and landscape videos every week because I do a lot of that type of work. I only shoot still shots with a D850. But I enjoy the film videos as well as the stills. Which tells the story better? Again, depends on the story to be told. I love each of them for what their own qualities. There is no “better”. And here’s where I have to coin a phrase that I hear used too much in interviews of athletes, “It is what it is”.
Thanks Pascal for the post! It contains some very interesting thoughts.
“You can question whether evoking something in the viewerâs mind is storytelling. To me, it isnât really.”
I was thinking about this very often during the last weeks. I think my landscape images are often able to evoke a certain feeling or mood. And I asked myself if this is a kind of storytelling. I’m not sure. But I have the same feeling as Pascal. I think it isn’t. At least not in the same sense and intensity as the storytelling in a good film.
“Togs will do anything to get rid of visual obstructions in a photograph but filmmakers will do anything for the opposite, as it adds layering and realism.”
That’s definitely food for thoughts for me. In the past (as a landscape tog) it was always very important for me to avoid any obstructions like people, buildings, fences, or a cluttered foreground in my images. Currently, I automatically transfer this behavior to my filming. But maybe this is completely wrong. Especially if I really want to focus on storytelling.
“Photographs without human looking figures can be striking, but there is little chance of strong storytelling if human condition isnât at least implied in some way.”
Another aspect where I have to change my behavior. With my photography, I very seldom included people in my images. With filming, this is probably not a good idea anymore. But this means I either have to convert myself to a YT vlogger (and I’m definitely not one of the ‘Hey Guys’ types) or I have to learn how to approach other people and also how to deal with the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) in the EU as well as model releases. Difficult.
And finally, I have a question: I think photography without storytelling can work perfectly. Do you think it is possible to create a great film without any storytelling? Or will it always end as in your La Ciotat example.