Narrative

Narrative plays an important role in advertising, magazine editorials, as well as in the fine arts due to it’s ability to draw the viewer into the storyline and wonder what has brought the subjects to this point in the story. The visual depictions of stories traces back to prehistoric cave paintings, renaissance altarpieces and paintings from the 18^th century. Painters illustrated grand stories from mythology on large canvases and prehistoric “artists” depicted legends passed down through their tribe on cave walls. In the present, artists such as Tom Hunter and Gregory Crewdson create their own stories through set design, cinematic lighting, and subjects caught in a moment.

My work goes hand in hand with narrative whether it is extremely subtle such as my work with the apple in the bathtub or my current work in which I create different characters and set them in different scenes with something obviously going on off camera. I want my series for this year to include narrative as a very important quality. I want to create strange storylines that will allow the viewer to draw their own conclusions based on the visual information I give them. 

“Tableau photography has its precedents in pre-photographic art and figurative painting of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, and we rely on the same cultural ability to recognize a combination of characters and props as a pregnant moment in a story.” (Cotton)

“Some of the photographs shown here make obvious references to fables, fairy tales, apocryphal events, and modern myths that are already part of our collective consciousness. Others offer a much more oblique and open-ended description of something that we know is significant because of the way it is set up in the photograph, but whose meaning is reliant on our investigating the image with our own trains of narrative and psychological thought.” (Cotton)

Cotton, Charlotte. The Photograph as Contemporary Art. London: Thames & Hudson, 2009. Print.

Chapter two addresses how contemporary photographers use narrative in their work, through illustrating mythology or creating stories of their own. The text provides a vast amount of information about different artists whose work utilizes narrative in order to bring our certain feeling in the viewer or to state a point such as with Izima Kaoru's series in which he photographs famous models playing women who have died due to some accident. When looking for artists to reference in relation to narrative, this book gives many examples as well a concise summary on what the body of work is about.