Photography Tip .3: Create a World - Develop a Language
Good photos tell stories, and stories don’t live in vacuum. A good story needs a world to live in. Whether this world is based on “the real world” or whether it is a figment of your imagination, it is an essential ingredient, if not the basis, of visual story telling.
Phone Home
What Makes a World?
A world is created in every photo, whether you intended to create one or not. The moment you decide to point your camera to one object or the other, to capture a wide field of view or a narrow one, to wait for a smile or to capture a puzzled “unready” expression, to use extensive color or to go for black and white — the moment you make all these decisions a world is created.
At the end of the day, there is really no such thing as “capturing reality”. Everything you do (as a photographer or as viewer) is involved with filtering reality, interpreting it, and adding numerous layers of experience, feelings, and thoughts. Therefore, I prefer the term “capture a reality“ – one of many possible (or impossible) realities.
Of course not all worlds are created equal. Some are more interesting, some are more intriguing, some are sad, and some are “just” visually attractive.
p(L)ease
A world is defined by everything in it. The world you create in your photo is a combination of colors, composition, atmosphere, and subjects. Just like “the real world” around us, the world you create is sometimes explicit, but sometimes it contains subtle (almost invisible) connections that trigger some feeling in the mind of the viewer. Sometimes a flower is just a flower, but sometimes it is a trigger to a thought about someone you love. The world — any world — is defined by our interaction with it.
And just like the real world, the world created within a photo has rules. You are free to decide that in your self-made world people can fly. You can decide people can be duplicated in your world, and that a person can interact with her clone. You can decide that in your world everything is black and white. As the creator of the world, you are free to define the rules.
A world becomes even more meaningful when it reappears in more than one work. When a world is built one frame at a time in a series of photos, the viewer is drawn into it. She can explore it, get familiar with it, discover new parts of it with every photo, and sometimes even feel even part of it.
A Visual Language
Creating a world in a visual work often means defining a visual language. A consistent visual language can used to express the rules of the world and to set its atmosphere.
From Urbanity, Part I: Antimatter
In Urbanity, Part I and Urbanity, Part II, for example, the post-processing, the colors, and the textures of the scene, all contribute to the atmosphere in the series. In a sense, they are defining the world in which the story takes place. Of course, the subjects I chose, and the way their interact with their surroundings is the heart of the world I created. They too are part of the defining visual language in these series.
In Stream of Consciousness, the blurriness, the tilted position of the camera, and decision to combine three frames into one strip, are all visual elements that helped me create an enigmatic atmosphere that takes the viewer into a mystery journey (see also: There Are No Rules).
From Fons Viate: Portrait of a Street
Fons Vitae tells the story of a street, but although the street exists in the real world, the world created in the series is a fictional creation shaped by the selection of subjects, the contrast, and the lack of color. It is that visual language that detach the world from the raw material it was created from. The portrait of the street is anything but documentary. It is fiction built on fragments of reality
A visual language is a foundation of any photographic world. When using it right it does not stand out by itself — it is rooted deep in the world you create. It defines the world and its rules, and often it affects how visitors to your world will react to it.
– Lidor Wyssocky
Photography Tip .2: Tell a Story
A picture is said to be worth a thousand words. True, but that’s only part of it. The best photos can actually tell a thousand stories.
Broken Wings
World Press Photo 2008
I just came back from the World Press Photo 2008 exhibition. It’s hard for me to describe my feelings. The best thing I can say is: I am both amazed and shocked — both speechless and troubled. Probably just as the people behind this important organization intended it to be.
I do not want to talk about the photos showing violent scenes, blood, weapons, crying people, wounded people, and dead people. I do want to talk about one photo telling a horrible story without showing any of those. A photo not taken in the heat of a battle or immediately after an act of terror. A photo that looks as if it was taken in a studio — with perfect lighting, with everything just in place, and with a girl sitting on a chair staring strait at the camera with a blank expression.
The dissonance between the technical perfection of that photo and the story behind it, and the fact that the story is being told without showing any explicit act of violence, kept me hypnotized — staring at Francesco Zizola’s work for long minutes.
I could only wish this story, as well as others I was exposed to today, wasn’t real. Unfortunately, this is not the case.
– Lidor Wyssocky
The Stories Behind The News
If there is one domain in photography that defined Visual Story Telling as its goal, it is without a doubt photojournalism. Photojournalism is all about photos that tell stories — real stories. A photo can clearly add depth to a news story. Sometimes, a photo does a better job in telling the story than any combination of words can.
For that reason I was very excited when my friend send me the link to the New York Times’ 2008 in Pictures. This collection of photos beautifully demonstrates the realistic branch of Visual Story Telling. But this is only the beginning…
As I browsed this amazing gallery, I started to see other stories. I let myself forget the real news story that was the trigger to each photo. Instead, I tried to let each photo open the door to other stories — imaginary ones.
This is what makes the photos is this gallery so strong. They don’t only complement news items. Each of them is a creation on its own merits. They don’t only tell “the” story. They can tell numerous stories. If you just let them….
– Lidor Wyssocky