Talking Pictures
THERE IS A POWER IN A FEW still photographs and a story well-told. The curious thing is that photographers seem to be rediscovering and then promptly forgetting that simple truth.
It all started some time ago, in 1962, with a fictional photo-roman by French writer, photographer and film-maker Chris Maker who made La Jetée using only narration, sound, and still photographs. The 20-minute film inspired film-makers and artists and won a slew of awards, but it’s hard to recall anything of similar sophistication produced since. Motion picture and video have completely taken over.
Exactly 20 years later, two Manitobans, photographer John Paskievich and film-maker Mike Mirus adopted the form for a documentary purpose and produced a short National Film Board documentary Ted Baryluk’s Groceryperfectly blending still photographs and sound to tell an intergenerational story of an immigrant family, a store, and changing nature of modern Canada. The most important difference, aside form Maker’s work being fiction and this one a documentary, is that Paskievich and Mirus included no narration in their documentary and simply allowed the characters to tell their own stories. There is something magical that happens when you allow people to speak in their own unmediated voice. The intimacy and immediacy that the form allows for an almost instant connection between the audience and the storyteller.
That is exactly the approach photographer Todd Heisler took in his powerful series produced for the New York Times called One in 8 Million. That series eventually won an Emmy, but, more importantly, it created a perfect multimedia story form for the digital age — a form that was soon largely abandoned in favour of on-line video.
The project I am a part of, 70/70, takes the same approach. At about four and a half minutes, the individual segments are a bit longer than the NYT episodes.
Just like Heisler’s work, 70/70 episodes rely on comparatively few photographs, a story told by one single voice, and ambient sound recorded on location. This approach is only one of the possible ways to tell a compelling audio-visual story that brings together still photographs and sound. British photographer Daniel Meadows has been working on what we would today call multimedia for large part of his career. His work in 2000s with BBC Wales on collaborative, participatory digital storytelling is fascinating. His Photobus site is full of what he calls digital stories and they provide an insight into his career, life and the world around him in an easy and intimate series of vignettes that feel like a conversation with a friend. In much of his work he relies on his own narration over the photographs with the exception of Talking Pictures — a series of 20 short audio-slideshows featuring the photographs and voices from the 1970s. They are an incredible slice of time and beyond charming.
Photographer as a narrator often accompanied by carefully produced soundtrack was the approach adopted by Magnum Photos for their now defunct series Magnum In Motion. Such audio-slideshows made for a very different experience. The focus shifted to the photographer as a storyteller which gave a fascinating, behind-the-scenes, feel to the photographs telling some of the most complex and important stories of our time. Magnum continues producing multimedia packages and many of them are available on their Vimeo page.
Today, multimedia refers mostly to web-based video. With the availability of broadband internet access, the advancements in smart phone technology and video editing capabilities across electronic devices, video became the medium of choice for online journalism as much as for personal use. Within the academy, researchers are increasingly enamoured with digital stories as a way to disseminate their work beyond their traditional audiences. More often than not, what they call digital stories are simply short videos or, at best, short films, usually produced by students and rarely in cooperation with actual film makers.
A few researchers, such as visual sociologist Douglas Harper, who is a skilled photographer and one of the greatest advocates of photography as a research method, experimented with multimedia approaches as a research and dissemination method, but film has clearly won over the academy. With the advancements in smartphone camera and video technology and the increase in raw processing power, video is arguably an easy and potentially very participatory method for producing large amounts of visual data.
Be that as it may, I still think there is a beauty and intimacy in an artful and thoughtful blend of well-recorded audio and well-shot and edited still photographs. At their best, these vignettes allow for storytelling that is intimate and somehow almost theatrical in ways that feels closer to some ancient call we all respond to when we hear a story well told. ✖︎