Narrative Image Making

Research for narrative image making!

The things you need to create a narrative image are;

lighting for mood, symbols & signs, subject & objects that symbolize, text, sets, colours, clothes, equipment, scene, gestures, expressions, language, characters, theme, location, music, composition, body language, weather, audience, plot, fact or fiction,imagination, and most of all the story and meaning.

these are the overall signifiers and signified needed.

A picture can tell a story almost instantly! it needs a focus point, artists statment, it needs to how signifiers or signified points.

The deffinition of narrative imagery!

1.Narrative Image The how & why of visual storytelling By Daniela Molnar

2. Stories are integral to human culture.Visual stories are a powerfully directmethod of conveying information,ideas, and cultural wisdom.

• 3. Part 1: How do imagescommunicate? Part 2: Types of narrative images

• 4. Part 1: How doimages communicate?

• 5. Images tell stories using semiotics, asort of visual grammar.> Semiotics <Visual cues, or signs, are combinedinto patterns that transmit messagesto the viewer.

• 6. Philosopher/scientist Charles Sanders Peirce (1839 - 1914) categorized signs as iconic symbolic indexical

• 7. An iconic sign looks like what it represents -- aportrait or a scientific illustration, for example.8. A symbolic sign does not look like what it represents andits meaning must be learnt. Its meaning is fundamentallyarbitrary because it is based on cultural associations. Forexample, a stop sign, a flag, a traffic light, a company’s logo,or the Statue of Liberty.

• 9. An indexical sign is a clue that links meanings. Itsassociation with this meaning is not arbitrary but isphysically or causally connected. Smoke, for example, isan indexical sign of fire; a pointing finger is an indexicalsign of whatever it is pointing at; 90 degrees on athermometer is an indexical sign that it is hot out.

• 10. “heart”iconic symbolic indexical

the above text was copied and pasted from the internet,

examples of narrative imagery below

TYPES OF IMAGES/ narratives : – a story or an account of a sequence of events in the order in which they happened – the art or process of telling a story or giving an account of something. Compositionally you can use the following types of shots to create a story:• Establishing Detailed,Main andConcluding shots.

the great war by jonathan cape

About the book

Synopsis

The opening photograph is of the gun that fired the first shot of the war.

The final photograph is of an audio recording showing the arrival of silence on the eleventh hour of the eleventh day of the eleventh month of 1918.

The advent of popular photography meant that the Great War was the first conflict to be documented in photographs, from the deserts of the Middle East to the mud of Western Front. Now the digital age has made it possible to construct a single photographic narrative that follows the war on multiple fronts, covering the conflict on land, sea and air.

Imperial War Museums in London houses one of the greatest photographic archives of conflict in the world, collecting hundreds of thousands of pictures of the First World War from all the combat nations. This unique book is divided into five sections, each prefaced with a detailed chronology of events and a historical summary, together with detailed captions for every picture.

here are some images of ss officer karl hockers photo albumdocumentary photography

AUSCHWITZ THROUGH THE LENS OF THE SS

here is some information i found on the Internet it is a fantastic example of documentary photography also the type of story being told within the images using narrative 

i first seen this on a documentary program and its about an SS officer during world war 2 documenting all the horrible things he and his fellow soldiers did during the holocaust the narrative i would say s horror and it also shows real life events

the SS officer who took the images is called karl hocker.

karl hocker

here are some images of ss officer karl hockers photo album

with his fellow officers 

note: faces dont look concerned about what is happening in the camp!

horrible sleeping conditions 

note: faces look unsure of there future

proud officer with slave behined him

organising who is fit for work and who is going to the gas chambers!

below is information from the internet

The photographs depict Höcker with other SS officers in Auschwitz in the summer and fall of 1944 and provide us with a new understanding of their lives and activities in the camp. Even in the final months of the war, after Soviet troops had liberated concentration camps and labor camps to the east, SS officers stationed at Auschwitz enjoyed social functions and formal ceremonies. The album shows Auschwitz at a pivotal time—the period during which the gas chambers were operating at maximum efficiency—as the Hungarian Jews arrived and during the last months before the evacuation of the camp. The only other known album of photographs taken at Auschwitz, published as the "Auschwitz Album" (first published in 1980), specifically depicts the arrival of the Hungarian Jews and the selection process that the SS imposed upon them.

artists that use narrative imagery!

guy bourdin

guy bourdin was a french fashion photographer 
his first fashion shots where published in the february addition of vogue paris in 1955 he stayed working for the magazine until 1987

In his photography guy bourdin uses quirky compositions to highlight his work!

bourdin was the first photographer to create a complex narrative and then snatch the moment,

all of his images portrays key things like

sensual,shocking,exotic,surrealistic,and sometimes sinister!

All of the narratives he used where mysterious maybe even violent and sometimes sexy!

here are some more of guy bourdins images below

violent

sexy

surreal

Gregory crewdon

gregory crewdson is an american photographer  who is best know for elaborately staging scenes of american homes and neighborhoods,
he uses massive sets to create his images and these would iclude the help of dozens of workers he has also been know to not even take the picture himself!
crewdson gets insperation from movies such as  close encounters of the third kind, vertigo, and blue velvet' most of crewdsons images are very surreal!

here are some of crewdons images

storytelling photography

below is a fantastic example of storytelling photography i found on the internet

ive copied and pasted the information for research purposes

A picture is worth a thousand words” – this is a quote we’re all familiar with! The idea of course is that a situation, or an idea, that would take a lot of words to describe or explain, can be illustrated by just a single image. Or in other words, a single photograph can tell a story.

But some photos tell more of a story than others. So what makes a good storytelling photograph?

A photograph of a deserted beach at dawn, with nothing but sand and sea in it, may well be beautiful, but doesn’t necessarily tell much of a story.

But the same scene with a line of footprints along the sand, and a distant figure, might have a bit more of a narrative.

A photograph doesn’t have to have people in it to be a storytelling photo – for instance, a picture of a room in an abandoned house, with an old rusty bedstead and a broken jug on the floor, may tell a poignant story, conjuring up questions about the people who used to live there, and why they left.

But more often than not, a storytelling photo will contain at least one person.

A studio portrait won’t usually tell much of a story – but a person photographed in an interesting context may well do. So the background is often very important in this kind of photography – and as always in photography, it’s important to think about what you include in and what you exclude from your image.

If you were writing a story about a person, you would use words to set them in a context of some sort. In the same way, a good storytelling photo will set a person in their context.

Sometimes including just one or two interesting and relevant background elements can make a stronger photograph than one which includes lots of detail, some of which adds nothing that is relevant to the narrative.

If you have more than one person in your photograph, then think about how you want to express or convey the relationship between them. In street photography, this will happen naturally, as you observe your subjects interacting. But if you have set up the photograph, you’ll need to make decisions about whether the people face each other or face the camera, what they are doing with their hands, and so on.

Sometimes a storytelling photo can have an intriguing edge if there is only one person in the picture, who seems to be interacting with someone outside the frame – it leaves the viewer wondering about what has just happened, or what will happen next.

Telling a story in a single image can be very powerful. An alternative is to use multiple photographs to tell a story – and this can be done in all sorts of genres, including travel photography, wedding photography, or social documentary photography. The key then is to edit carefully, choosing only pictures that really add to the overall tale. Better to show ten really strong, relevant photographs than fifty weak ones!