The author behind the lens
Your story, your sequence, your stage
Last week I wrote about what a photograph can't do... and does anyway. This week it's about the person behind the work: the choices that turn a collection of images into a story.
When you understand why one photography project moves you and another leaves you cold, you almost always arrive at three fundamental choices. Not as a checklist, but as interconnected vessels. They are inseparable, and the strength of a project lies in how well they align.
Your story is what you have to say. Not the subject. The subject is the river, the neighbourhood, the person. Your story is what you want to convey about that river, that neighbourhood, that person. Two photographers can shoot the exact same landscape and tell completely different stories, because they bring a different point of view. Your story is your perspective, and that is irreplaceable.
Your sequence is how you bring those images together. Chronological, geographical, thematic, or no linear logic at all, just an associative order that the viewer has to decipher for themselves. The sequence determines the rhythm of the story. A project that builds towards a climax feels different from one that throws you in at the deep end. Your sequence is your timing.
Your stage is where and how the story appears. A book is different from an exhibition. And a newsletter different from a printed magazine. But your stage is more than the medium. It’s also the paper, the binding, the white space on the page, the order of prints on the wall. Your stage is the tone of voice in which you say something.
What’s interesting is that the same story can take on a completely different weight through a different sequence or a different stage. A series of raw, dark images in a small hand-bound booklet feels intimate and personal. Those same images as large prints in a white gallery space become a statement. The photographs are identical. The story is not.
That’s why the edit, selecting, sequencing and presenting of images, is perhaps the most underrated creative act in photography. Not making the photograph, but deciding what your story becomes.
The photographer as author
Every photograph you make is a choice. But the choices you make after you press the shutter are just as decisive.
Which images make it into the series. Which ones fall away. What is the first image the viewer sees and (perhaps more importantly) what is the last. How much room do you give the viewer to breathe between strong images. Where is the tension, and where is the rest.
This process of selection is what makes you, as a photographer, an author. Not the technique or the equipment, not even the access to the subject. Anyone who spends enough time somewhere will come across good images. What you do with those images afterwards is the real creative act.
That sounds very obvious, but in practice it’s often harder than it seems. Because selecting also means letting go. Images that are precious to you because you know what went into making them, or how difficult they were to get. Images that are technically strong but disrupt your story. Images you love yourself, but that say nothing to the viewer.
The best editors, whether that’s you or someone you trust, don’t look at the photographs that exist. They look at the story that needs to come. They work backwards. What do I want the viewer to feel when they’re done? And which images lead there?
That’s also why an outsider can sometimes edit your work better than you can yourself. Not because they know more about photography, but because they see the story without the weight of having made it.
The camera records. The author decides.
How do you edit your series?
Till next week,
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All useful comments not only for photos and also for other kinds of "media." For example I've been helping non-native English scientific researchers publish their manuscripts and finding that fixing the grammar is easy and relatively trivial. But helping them tell their "story" well to bring out its scientific significance and relevance to other published work which is necessary in a cover letter to draw the interest of managing editors even to move it into the review process rather than rejecting it out of hand and then accepted by formal reviewers is a much more difficult task. And these qualities must also be framed (to expand the comparison into a possibly bad metaphor) to capture the interest and understanding of a journal's readers. As an avid photographer I'm seeing these issues to be pretty similar for both of these outputs and thanks for articulating them so well.
For most of my photographic life (52 years...and change) I've never thought of myself as an 'author'. Even though I may have taken several rolls or MBs of digital images, my photographs have been stand-alone records of a scene. The existence of Facebook, Instagram, etc, reinforce this as most people post singular images and move on. Recently, I've started to edit in groups - mostly by geography but increasingly by subject / association - with the intention of producing zines, books or slideshows.