Photographic story telling: how to go from a snapshot to a story

Story telling, certainly these two words have never enjoyed so much celebration as in recent times.

It seems that everything has turned into an immense narrative cauldron, sometimes even inappropriately, but you know, this is how it works when a particular concept manages to make inroads across the board.

Here we are witnessing the great binge… until the phenomenon diminishes and everything returns to normal, up to the sanctification in (multi)media sauce of the new phenomenon.

A story can be everywhere, but not everything hides a story

Precisely because excellent ideas for a photographic narration are hidden more or less everywhere, the risk is that many of us, especially those who are beginners or those burned by the creative fire, can fall into the error that it is enough to point a camera, frame a scene and shoot to get a good story,

Yes, stories are everywhere, but not every scene hides a story worth telling.

What is a story?

The most concise definition of history I have is this: a story is the narration of concatenated events, real or invented, which develop according to a plot.

Every story always has:

• an author,
• a plot
• a target audience
• as well as often, a purpose.
  

If you'll indulge me in linguistics, a story represents a tool for establishing a connection between the author and the audience and is based on a paradox: to connect with its target audience, the author must be able to arouse an emotion, but, at the same time, to excite his audience, the author must be able to establish a connection.

Example vs. history

It is not the same thing and we realize it every time we attend a very boring presentation built only on raw data and information, devoid of any connection to our emotional sphere.

Listing numbers is not telling a story, it is making an example.

But if our speaker has been shrewd and has been able to introduce an emotional variable into his exposition, a detail or an aspect capable of arousing empathy in us, he goes from giving an example to telling a story.

Introducing an emotional variable in the exposition is telling a story and it is thanks to this emotional variable that stories don't bore us or bore us a little less than examples.

Therefore, we could summarize as follows: STORY = CONTENT + EMOTION

We learn to snap a story

Whenever I talk about photographic story telling, I often like to draw parallels between writing and photography, borrowing many concepts that underlie the theory of semantics and literary criticism, as well as linguistics.

Personally, I have always photographed to tell stories, which I can sometimes compare to short stories, in the case of loose and free-standing shots, or to stories, in the case of sequences or short reports, up to novels of a certain body, in the case of more articulated and complex.

WHAT SEPARATES A SIMPLE SHOOT FROM A STORY?

I personally believe that, apart from a solid intention, a shot must be the final product of a vision to turn into a story.

If the intent answers the question why I want to shoot this scene, the vision instead answers all those questions that refer to how I want to shoot this scene.

Is a solid intent and a well-groomed vision enough to ensure the transition from shot to story? Unfortunately not, but they narrow the distance.

For our shots to turn into stories we have to measure ourselves against the message we intend to convey, with its intrinsic ability to interest our target audience and with the empathy that the message, through our personal vision, is able to arouse.

Our stories are often short stories

Let's not forget that we are often called upon to tell stories through a single shot and that a shot, unlike a story or even better than a novel, can be compared to a short story.

Like the authors of short stories, who cannot count on in-depth descriptions of places or characters, much less on introductions or digressions, we writers for images, photographic story tellers, must learn to better manage the elements we have available to tell our story, eliminate superfluous ones, compose carefully, choose the correct technique – which must always be a support and never a protagonist.

The ability to produce quality photographic stories certainly depends on a solid intent, on a message capable of moving and establishing an empathetic connection for itself and on a vision – which I would like you not to reduce to a synonym of “execution” – capable of convey our message.

Let's see some basic elements for storytelling with photographs:

The mood
The mood is the mood that pulls the strings of the narrative.
Creating the right mood is not easy as it is something that is perceived, but not seen.

The idea
Exposing an idea through photography can be quite difficult. Once you have an idea, it will be easier to make your photos.

Emotion
Use facial expressions if you want your photos to convey the right emotions. You can also do this by capturing an action your subject performs. For example, after showing a close-up of a person's tears, you can show their face streaked with tears, or their eyes red and swollen, their hands balled into fists.

Storytelling
For photo storytelling to work, you should have a clear picture of what happened before this person cried. For example, in the case of a child you could show him holding his mother's hand or looking through a shop window at toys. You should know what to include or exclude in the scene, though. It is not necessary to show the mother's or father's face. Just a shot of the child's hand and the parent's hand. The storytelling game is made up of details that stimulate curiosity.

the message
Find a theme for your story, using this theme to establish the message you want to convey. It can be an object, the location, the colors, the style or a combination of all of these, clues so that the viewer is able to form ideas about what may still be happening.

In short, telling with images is not something for the lazy

If you were expecting a nice dot decalogue with ten tricks for telling photographic stories, I'm afraid I have disappointed you.

Unfortunately narrating is an art and, even if there are some tricks of the trade, a lot has to do with our approach to photography, which must never disregard technical knowledge, but whose technical knowledge is not enough.

A great photographer always repeated "that even mules learn the technique". He was tragically right, as always, but behind that recurring butade of his there was a secondary that he never uttered and that only left one to suppose: "but mules don't know how to take pictures".

Because this is the secret and the singularity of photography, the real one, the one that tries to tell and excite.

It's a bit like dealing with a cocktail, 1/3 technique, 1/3 rationality, 1/3 emotion and a splash of ass (in the sense of "luck").

Here, this cocktail, I think represents photography quite well, as I understand it, but the even more delicious, empirical, intimate and singular aspect, which makes photography even more of a very personal matter, is that none of those third parties is ever really 1/3.