A Note for Photographer “Storytellers”
Over the years I've seen a lot of photographers who claim to be storytellers. This is, of course, a great thing. People love stories and we need them. Here comes the but...but many storytellers I've seen don't actually take the time to tell stories with their images - they just tell stories in their captions. This is a critical line to be drawn, I think. In my view, you can't tell a story visually with one image. You can caption the hell out of it but it doesn't mean that a story is being told visually. In this medium, you need multiple images if you're going to visually tell a story otherwise you're merely providing part of the narrative. After all, a story has a beginning, a middle, and an end, right? Unless you're Quentin Tarantino.
For one of my last photo sessions of the year, I was visiting Worli Village again. For the first time, I saw one of the Koli fishermen carrying a picture of Shiva to take with them on their voyage. What better god to take with you than the Protector and Destroyer? Starting with the hero shot, the first image of the young man holding the picture, I took a series of him descending the steps to hand off the picture to his partner in the boat. I edited four images for this series although I could have narrowed it down to three. I wanted to showcase the staircase portion and the handoff of the picture before they paddled away to fish. Beginning, middle, and end. Had I been a photojournalist, I'd probably started much earlier in the narrative, starting with the morning chai and retrieving the picture of Shiva, wherever it had rested for the evening. Then I would have gone with the fishermen on their boat to continue the "story." My hero shot would have become a point of reference in a much longer sequence then and maybe the Shiva handoff would have been left out entirely.
Although I'm not a photojournalist or documentary photographer, I do run custom photo workshops in Mumbai for those of you who are aspiring storytellers. Click on the button for details.
