The Telling Photo

When I am presented with a photo, or maybe a little group of photos in a book, portfolio, or show, I assume that these pictures have been selected from a larger collection of pictures, that they have been singled out as special somehow.

There are endless reasons one might select this photo over that. Perhaps this one reveals something. Perhaps it simply goes better with that other photo. Perhaps it is of a unique occurrence, or perhaps it most clearly illustrates a common occurrence. And on, and on. It does not much matter what the rationale is for selecting this photo, or these 30 photos, out of the larger mass.

Indeed, there need not even be a rationale. There are probably reasons for showing me 27 pictures selected at random. The point is that I will not, as a base assumption, assume that this is what you're up to. I will assume, absent other information, that photos you show me are special, that they are for some reason telling photographs.

Further, my assumption is that your rationale should be in some sense clear. A rationale that cannot be discerned is the same, to me, as no rationale at all.

That is, when you show me a photo or a group of 32 photos, or a book, I am justified, I think, in attempting to work out what binds these pictures together, what reason you had for selecting these over others. This may seem obvious, even blockheaded, but I want to be very very clear here: the rationale under which you selected these pictures is, to my way of thinking, pretty much the point. These photos are, I imagine, telling photos, and it is my job to work out why. The thing you are trying to tell me, the experience you want me to have, is, in my mind, inextricably bound up in the whatever-it-is that makes these photos more special, and that makes the ones you edited out less special.

Obviously, I could point to any number of MFA photo books which serve as examples of not doing this. The seemingly random collection of photographs of nothing at all is more or less the bread and butter of the Art Making class.

Let us instead examine the work of Street Photographers, Simon King's Instagram to be precise. He uses the same set of graphical/visual tropes everyone else in the genre uses. The Intimate Moment, the Amusing Juxtaposition, The Tiny Silhouette, and of course the every popular What The Fuck. Sometimes he rolls out The Interesting Face.

All of these have the general scent of the Telling Photo, but they are not. They in fact perfectly ordinary snaps which reveal nothing special, are of nothing special. They are Untelling Photos which, having been rendered in high contrast black and white, and having a certain strongly graphical quality, signal that they are Telling Photos.

Consider this photo (mine, copying the trope,) a standard issue Tiny Silhouette:

It feels portentous, potent, as if it ought to be a metaphor for something, or whatever. Indeed, paired with the right surrounding material, I might accept it as a metaphor for man's inherent solitude or whatever. By itself, it is portent without content. It's just a person walking down an alley. Compare with this:

This is just a guy sitting with one girl, looking at another girl. It's my fake Winogrand, which long-time readers are probably thoroughly sick of. This is, I argue, a telling photograph because it reveals particularly well a specific, common, social moment. When a pretty girl walks in to a coffee shop, men look at her. This is common, but in this era it is a slightly fraught social moment, and this photograph does a particularly good job of summarizing it.

Most people with a cultural background remotely similar to mine will recognize it in a moment, and cringe slightly.

People walking down alleys is just as common, but it is not an interesting social phenomenon, and my photograph does not do a particularly thrilling job of explicating it, anyways. There is no reaction to a person walking down an alley, it is an action which carries little or no weight.

The alley photo, my Tiny Silhouette, is vastly stronger as a graphical object but isn't in any meaningful way a telling photo. I can bang them out all day, and so can Simon King, and nothing will ever be revealed by them.

Is it OK to just go shoot masses of graphically strong photographs signifying nothing?

Of course it is, do what you will. When, however, you put these things up on instagram, or put them in a book, or on a wall, I am going to look for something more than graphical strength.

King, and other Senior Street Photographers, spend a remarkable amount of time writing sort of thin think-pieces in which they say, essentially, that their graphically strong photographs are actually really great, because they are made by storytellers. King is a storyteller. What stories he tells, I am unsure, beyond well, that appears to be yet another picture of a human being, and humans usually have some sort of story?

In the same way, the MFA photobook can generally be viewed as a bunch of nothing photographs which reveal nothing, together with a collection of "texts" and design tics which attempt to explain why these nothing pictures are in fact something.

Indeed, there are days when the vast majority of the grand enterprise of photography seems to spend far more effort on explaining why meaningless pictures are actually great pictures than it spends on trying to make pictures or bodies of work that actually mean something.