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Narrative photography

A narrative series is a sequence of images that depicts a story. This is a technique first crafted by the American photographer Duane Michals. 

 

Diptych - A pair of images that contain a narrative.

Triptych - A sequence of three images that contain a narrative. 

Duane Michals

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'The Bogeyman' by Duane Michals - 1973

Duane Michals is an American photographer who specialises in creating sequences of images which carry a narrative. Born in 1932 in McKeesport, PA, Michals received a BA from the University on Denver, before serving two years in the armed forces. Upon returning in 1956, Michals went to study at Parsons School of Design, following his ambition to become a graphic designer. However he did not complete his studies. 

 

In 1958 whilst on holiday in the USSR, he discovered an interest in photography, the photographs from this trip becoming his first exhibition at The Underground Gallery, New York, in 1963. 

 

Michals is responsible for two photographic innovations in the 1960s and 1970s. One innovation was his production of sequences of images that ‘told a story’, shown in his 1970s book ‘Sequences’. The second was his handwritten text titles and other information on his images that delivered the missing data not shown in the images. 

 

In this particular sequence, Michals explores the concept of fear and the imagination. The bogeyman is a character embedded in our minds at a young age and is a generalised personification of all of our fears. The sequence starts as an innocent looking scene, with a young girl reading a book in a room. However, the presence of the long coat hanging on the coat stand begins to establish an ominous atmosphere. We see the girl become aware of the coat looming behind her and hence we watch her get up and check it’s empty in order to dispel her fears. Comforted by the lack of anyone inside the coat, she returns to her chair to sleep. All appears fine, however the viewers become increasingly afraid as the coat grows a pair of legs and begins to blur. This feeling of terror increases as the coat is released from its stand and towers over the girl, before finally stealing her away. 

 

It is not uncommon for your heart to skip a beat at a shadow that looks like another person, however it is almost always the case that our eyes are playing tricks on us and there really isn’t anyone there. However this series draws on those experiences and the irrational fears, terrorising the viewer, showing them that their fears can come to life. It is hence that this series

has a high psychological impact on the viewer, enhancing their uneasiness in irrational situations, encouraging their imaginations to run away into the darkest aspects. 

 

Compositionally, the images are laid out with a large space down the centre of the two columns, with smaller spaces between the vertical images. This encourages the viewer to look at the images going down the two columns, rather than across the rows. Furthermore, the images are a clearly a collective as they all feature the same composition, with the angle of the camera remaining the same and only the two figures moving between the frames. This makes the narrative easy to follow and hence the message is more plain to see. In response to this, I will attempt to lay out my own series in an ‘easy to follow’ structure, allowing the message to be more bold.

“I believe in the imagination. What I cannot see is infinitely more important than what I can see”

— DUANE MICHALS

Inspiration

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Untitled by Julianna Kunstler - n.d.

I particularly like this image by Julianna Kunstler, portraying a man with his face obscured by various different mediums. Initially the man has a cigarette in his mouth, the smoke collecting under the rim of his hat, concealing his identity. Secondly, the man shakes his head from side to side during the exposure time, resulting in a blurred visage, once more screening the identity. Lastly, the man resorts to hiding his face behind his hands, keeping himself from being distinguished. 

 

I like the simplicity of the composition - with only a grey backdrop, isolating the model - and how it juxtaposes the more complex narrative of secrecy. I feel that the monochrome of the image makes it more powerful as the lack of colour further reduces the recognition of any personality and hence the image becomes more relatable to the viewer. 

 

I hope to produce a work that connects with people in the same way that this triptych does, representing a feeling that we all share. 

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'Barking the Willow, second triptych of sequence' by Heather Sheehan - 2013

This sequence by Heather Sheehan delves into a far more morbid narrative. The first image shows a mellow image of a woman sat in a chair, looking out of a window. Next, we see the woman standing between the open frames, on the window ledge. Lastly, the woman is gone and we are left with an out of focus image of the same window, left open still. This images in this triptych become increasingly darker as the the tale reaches its macabre ending. The sequence is representative of a suicide, but can be interpreted more widely as an expression of loss. Whilst the woman sits in the chair the scene is light and tranquil, but as she nears her demise the scene becomes darker, perhaps showing the effect of the loss on the people around her, with a lack of focus on the last, darker image emphasising this point (or rather the lack thereof). 

 

The title for this series is ‘Barking the Willow’. There are multiple ways that this title could be interpreted and this fact is acknowledged and exploited in the description

of the series, confounding the viewer and forcing them to produce their own interpretation, rather than be steered towards a certain perspective

I feel that this is quite a controversial piece, depicting a not-so-savoury scene that the majority of people like to avoiding thinking about in the hope that it will cease to exist. I would very much like to present a narrative sequence that expresses a similar controversy and hence provokes thought and emotion within the viewer.

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Untitled by Paolo Cola - n.d.

I like this triptych by Paolo Cola as it includes a neat juxtaposition and also portrays a sense of movement. The curls of the staircase produce a natural flow, imitating the natural shapes found in things such as ferns and seashells. This juxtaposes the actual feature of the image - a man-made staircase. 

 

The diagonals produced by these curls give the image a dynamic feel, replicating the motion of walking down a set of stairs. The images are simplified by the use of monochrome, allowing the viewer to focus solely on the shifting atmosphere. Additionally, the trio of different angles of the same staircase provides a further dynamic atmosphere, conveying the concept of a journey through the multiple perspectives placed side by side. 

I like the altered perspectives of this image and the way that they provide a dynamic element. It is therefore that I would like to attempt to include some form of motion in my sequence, in order to make the images more visually appealing.

The power of titles

A title is a crucial component to an image. It can be used to steer the viewer to see the image from a different perspective than they originally may have done.

 

In his work, Duane Michals hand writes all of his title on his printed images occasionally alongside some additional information about the narrative. For example, he titled an image of a woman and a box ‘Madame Shrödinger’ alongside the caption ‘Madame Shrödinger wonders whether her missing cat is, or is not, inside the box’. This gives some context to the images (in this case employing the viewer’s understanding of the concept of Shrödingers cat - making it more amusing to a more highly educated audience) and targets the images at a specific audience. The handwritten feature of the titles also makes them more personal and hence they resound more within the viewers. 

Storyboard - SELF

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'Things are queer' by Duane Michals - 1973

For my Duane Michals response I decided to take inspiration from his ‘Things are queer’ sequence. I liked the cyclical nature of these images and the inceptive quality, hence my plan attempts to make use of these same qualities to produce a puzzling, but perhaps more personally meaningful sequence of images. I also decided to try and instil the more morbid themes from Michal’s ‘The Bogeyman’ series, and Sheehan’s ‘Barking the Willow’ series into my narrative in order to relate to feelings of fear and isolation within the viewer to make my images more powerful.

 

My narrative sequence is designed to zoom in on a particular member of a blurry crowd and zoom back out to their perception of themselves. I planned to do this with the use of a mirror providing the person’s ‘reflection’ of themselves. This links to the theme of identity in Kunstler’s work. I also wanted to incorporate a sense of motion after being inspired by the work of Cola, and hence I decided to include the blur of a crowd in the background of my images via the use of a long exposure.

Attempt 1

These images are my initial photos from my narrative shoot which I conducted in Exeter city centre. Unfortunately it was quite an overcast but bright sky, meaning that there was a lack of natural light on the subjects, yet an almost overwhelming amount of light in the sky, making it near impossible to get a good exposure without some form of clipping. I attempted this sequence four times in four different locations in order to give myself a greater chance of achieving some form of acceptable series. It also allowed me to (mostly) achieve my blurry crowd effect as the shoot was versatile enough to move to a new position in order to compose an image with more people in the background. The increase in the size of the crowd was also helped by the time 

gradually approaching midday and hence there were more people around. However, there were still not as many people as I would have liked, which was primarily down to the miserable weather discouraging shoppers from venturing out. 

In order to isolate the subject - and also make the crowd seem larger - I used a slightly long exposure so that the moving figures in the background would become blurred. This appeared to work quite well, however the lack of any real crowd made the images just appear as if they were poorly taken. Additionally, despite the exposure time being only 0.8”,  it was incredibly difficult for the model to stand perfectly still for the duration of the shot, thus producing blur in both the model and the ‘crowd’ for the majority of the images. 

 

Furthermore, I encountered an issue with rain on my mirror - providing a spatter of distractions on its surface that detract from the image. This, along with the messy backgrounds of the images make the whole set up seem incredibly amateurish - absolutely not the atmosphere I intended. I had hoped for a nice crowd with my subject isolated against it due to a small F-stop, however I had to use a large F-stop in order to gain a longer shutter speed without completely overexposing the image. In hindsight, it would perhaps would have worked better if I had used an ND filter so that I could’ve kept my

shallow depth of field and thus mostly eradicated the messy background. It is therefore that I hope to re-attempt this shoot, sacrificing the inclusion of a crowd in order to focus more on the expression of the model, hence allowing myself to take a higher quality series of images. 

In the editing process, I slowly desaturated each set of images, to make each slightly more washed out than the last. This effect was then juxtaposed in the last image with a monochrome section in the centre, surrounded by bright colours. This creates an emotive sequence, instilling a sense of sorrow. Increasing the clarity in the images also makes the subject more painfully clear, aiding the amalgamation of the mournful atmosphere. Lastly, I attempted to balance the brightness of the sky in the images by dropping the highlights right down and lifting the shadows slightly whilst keeping the blacks and whites approximately the same so that I did not utterly destroy the contrast of the image. 

 

In order to create my final juxtaposition images for my narrative, I took them into photoshop where I used the polygonal lasso tool to cut out the scene within the mirror. I then pasted this section onto a new layer, ordering it below the original so that I could use a black and white layer mask over it without affecting the rest of the image. I also added a brightness/contrast layer mask to increase the contrast of the mirror and make it stand out more against the rest of the photo.

Attempt 2

I re-attempted this shoot in a more studio based setting in order to produce higher quality images. This also allowed me to focus more on the expressions of the model, perfecting the consequent emotive atmosphere, rather than being preoccupied with location. Carrying out this shoot in the school dance studio allowed for a relatively clean background, with only a few messy items, however I was able to minimise the distraction via the use of a low F stop (F3.2) and hence a shallow depth of field, causing the subject to be isolated against a blurred backdrop. I also used two flash units, either side and slightly in front of the model which helped to further isolate the subject by lighting him obliquely and hence the background remained darker.

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I chose the images that I wanted to use for my sequences and made use of the saturation and split toning tools to should a gradual desaturation, making the mood shift from a light and happy tone to a more sombre one. The initial photo had slightly boosted saturation, and I altered the colours of the highlights, making them more yellowy so that the image appeared more cheerful. Across the series, I decreased the yellows, changing them to blues in the last two images to make them colder and more doleful.

 

I also produced a black and white edit of the series, linking back to the format of my inspirational artists. The lack of colour minimises all distraction, focusing the viewer purely on the expression of the model, helping to emphasise the sorrowful atmosphere.

Despite producing a black and white version of the series, I actually prefer the coloured one as I feel that it better portrays the emotion. The slowly diminishing colour complements the composition of the shots, making the sequence more powerful as a whole. 

 

I laid out the images in a regularly arranged sequence, on a white backdrop - in much the same way as Duane Michals - which appears to have become the standard presentation for this kind of work. I feel that this blocky arrangement can sometimes be limiting to the concept of the series, however here it works well as it juxtaposes a layout that is incredibly familiar to us with the notion that what we see isn’t necessarily the truth. 

Attempt 3

I also reattempted my shoot in another outside situation, but this time sacrificing the blurry crowd by completing the shoot in an empty playground. I was then able to use a faster shutter speed (1/160) to capture the model more in focus. 

 

I did not have to use my flash set up outside due to the large amount of natural light in the open space. Unfortunately, the sky was incredibly overcast and hence became a dense white space in the back of my images. This worked reasonably well for isolating the model however, contrasting his darker hair and clothing.

 

Due to the shoot being taken outside, I had to resort back to my much smaller mirror and therefore I was unable to produce an entire body reflection. I hence adjusted my angle to include a part of the model’s shoulder in the final image in order to give the image more context and better show that it consists of a person staring at their own reflection.

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For my final sequences, I produced both a black and white, and colour series once again. However this time I prefer the monochrome images. The overcast wintery sky made the images look incredibly cold to begin with so pushing the temperature up and saturating the yellows would do little to warm the photos. Furthermore, due to the low temperature, the model had to keep his jumpers on. These were unfortunately darker in colour than his shirt and hence any additionally saturation would just make his clothing seem even darker and thus would do little to brighten the image. 

 

The monochrome images do work quite well, I feel. They lack the complementary slow desaturation, but the expressions of the model - despite being quite mild - are emotive enough to maintain the power of the series. I had the model stand with his legs apart - a strong, wide base of support - showing a comfortable stance, the hands in pockets reinforcing this confidence. I could perhaps have asked him to clasp his hands in front of his body to give a slight hint of uneasiness, foreshadowing the rest of the series. 

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