Creative Photography

Claudia Brookes
 Narrative
Photography
“If you’ve seen it all, close your eyes.”

–Coco Capitan
“Creativity is seeing things other people see, but thinking something
different.”

–Albert Einstein
What is a narrative?
 Narratives:

Narration means the art of storytelling,

and the purpose of narrative is to tell
stories. Any time you tell a story to a
friend or family member about an event
or incident in your day, you engage in a
form of narration. In addition, a narrative
can be factual or fictional
• Something has to happen or unfold

• Something with a beginning a middle and an end

• Something that is resolved or a solution is found

• Something that might require a sequence

• Something that involves consequences

• It can be a personal narrative that tells the audience about yourself

• It can be made up or true/factual.

 Visual narratives:
Narrative photography is
the idea that photographs
can be used to tell a story.
Allen Feldman stated that
"the event is not what
happens. The event is
that which can be
narrated"
Peter Watkins
 Peter Watkins
His long-term autobiographical work
explores the subjects of loss, trauma,
and history. Watkins’s practice
meditates on the subjects of archiving
and remembering, exploring how
personal histories can be preserved or
lost through processes of
memorialisation
 “I used to walk around the streets photographing people and
detritus just like anyone else with a camera, until eventually I got
bored making photographs in this way. The revelation really came for
me when I realised that photography was essentially about
everything: philosophy, sociology, history, language, religion and
politics.”

–Peter Watkins
“The Unforgetting, a project relating to his mother who died when he
was a child, in which he seeks to readdress a missing narrative,
“exploring the notion of time and history through the photograph’s
capacity for storytelling and its elastic connection with memory and
metaphor.”
In February 1993, Peter Watkins’s mother walked from Zandvoort beach
into the North Sea to her death. The Unforgetting is the artist’s long-term
exploration of trauma, loss, and shared familial memory, all woven into a
series of works that have been created over a number of years, and now
for the rst time come together in the form of a book. At its core, the project
explores the tragic loss of his mother to suicide following an intense period
of mental instability and institutionalization. The personal charge with which
these images are made remains disguised, however, encouraging a
dialogue and narrative between the universal and the highly personal – a
photograph of cans of Super-8 with hold the images they contain;
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 Peter Watkins
ceremonial glasses appear transparent and emptied of
liquid; and the reoccurring motif of suspension and
weightlessness comes to counteract the anchored and
de nitive quality of the still life works. These object
assemblages have a totemic and monumental
appearance. Isolated from a greater whole, their
reimagining through the representational capacity of
photography moves them into the realm of the
associative, the artefact, and positions them as fragments
of evidence. Wood is present throughout the series and
points to the Germanic, the folkloric, of growth and of
time itself, both passing and splitting. These works are
universal in their stoic unwillingness to disclose their
deeply personal roots; but woven beneath their surfaces
are the stories and narratives that come to constitute the
biography of the departed. This series nds its core,
therefore, in the interplay between presences and
absences – the absence of the mother, and the traces of
her life explored in states of The Unforgetting.
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The work involves an absence, he says, which is then made present
through the photograph.
Many of his images have a sculptural quality and, as Watkins explains,
he is interested in moving away from photography’s medium speci city.
“I think art has an obligation to constantly renew and re ne – to stay
clear of stagnation,” he says. “My ideas about photography have
moved on in the past few years. I see a shifting plane, away from some
kind of false notion of photographic purity to a much more elastic
understanding and dissemination of the medium. Yet I’ve got a real
fear of the work slipping into cliché, and I nd myself constantly ghting
against this.”
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Intrigued by the awkwardness and unexpectedness of
the encounter, Watkins restaged the scene the following day, which
led to subsequent associations and photographs.
Literature and narrative structures play an important role in his
work, says Watkins. “I’m looking for poetic connections between
photographs – be it in the edit of a book, or in the way the work is
installed – to create a ow between images, analogous to how a
novel or a short story might read. I’m trying to move away from the
purely photographic and have been writing a lot. It’s a period of
experimentation,” he adds, “but I feel ready to lock down this work
and look forward to sharing it when it’s exhibited.”
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Noemie Goudal
Waterfall
Goudal makes a seemingly dry part of the forest
appear gushing with a majestic waterfall. She
transends her environment into a place of fantastical
natural beauty. What belies this work is maybe an
urge to escape the ordinary and everyday, to a
place where only a child like vivid imagination can
hope to take her. Through re-photographing these
scenes, she allows the viewer to be transported with
her on a journey through her elaborate narratives.
Noemie Goudal
Her work for me is awe-inspiring. Put simply, Goudal combines
the man made with the natural, quite distinctfully. But there is so
much more to it than that. Goudal corruptfully interfers with
space and perception with wonderfully imaginative results. She
creates these magnificent three-dimensional sets with a two-
dimensional composition for the camera, which are carefully
naunced. A narrative is creatively staged
 Jari Silomaki
Weather diaries is a series where Jari
exposes the text into the image in the
darkroom. Therefore making the diary entry
part of the image making process and
subsequently the photographic product.
There is also a strong interplay between
memory and capturing the moment in time,
referencing the inherent abilities of the
medium to preserve or trigger memory
“Remembering is forgetting. You cannot remember something until
you have forgotten it.”
Jari Silomaki
 Dat Vu
Good Morning, Midnight:

Decontextualised Narratives
Duane Michaels
Angels: Sequences
A Chance Meeting
Gregory Crewdson
 Gregory Crewdson

artist renowned for his elaborately

devised photographs of small-
town life, digs into the
commonplace and familiar to nd
images that are haunting, surreal
and—most agree—profoundly
unnerving.
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 “Through lmic sets Crewdson fuses ction with reality.”
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The effect of this combination of visual detail and narrative restraint
is that there are as many narratives possible for each of his images
as there are viewers of it: each person comes to the image with their
own anxieties and desires, which they project onto the scene. To
commemorate the release of Gregory Crewdson: Brief
Encounters (a documentary tracing his decades of work), Crewdson
sat down with The American Reader to talk about the limitations of
photography, the challenge of human connection, and the overlap
between the two.
His images are rich in detail, and there is not a thing in the frame—not
a stain, not a lampshade—that he does not carefully select. And yet,
this abundance of detail is balanced with a striking lack of information
—the settings are ordinary (a suburban kitchen, a living room, a dark
street corner)—and, more importantly, the frame is de-contextualized:
we don’t know what happens before or after, or who these people
even are.
 Jeff Wall
Is known for his large-format
photographs with subject matter
that ranges from mundane
corners of the urban environment,
to elaborate tableaux that take on
the scale and complexity of 19th-
century history paintings.
 ALLEGORY:

Allegory in art is when the subject of the artwork, or

the various elements that form the composition, is
used to symbolize a deeper moral or spiritual
meaning such as life, death, love, virtue, justice etc.
 A Sudden Gust of Wind

A Sudden Gust of Wind (after Hokusai) is a large colour

photograph displayed in a light box. It depicts a at, open
landscape in which four foreground gures are frozen as they
respond to a sudden gust of wind. It is based on a woodcut,
Travellers Caught in a Sudden breeze at Ejiri (c.1832) from a
famous portfolio The Thirty-six Views of Fuji, by the Japanese
painter and printmaker Katsushika Hokusai (1760-1849).
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 Sian Bonnell
Re-appropriating a pancake to be a
cleaning cloth suggests a narrative.
She has a book out also called
narrascape - where she creates
landscapes with a narrative through
re-appropriation. The viewer is left to
imagine the story that takes place.
Everyday Dada
Sian Bonnell - Uniting the
disconnected and the
disregarded
Surrealism
In photography
 The Jan Family
Create alternatives to everyday
routines
Franz Erhard
Walther
Shifting perspectives
“Seeing or laying out visually something that like an instruction
manual will use one sum of it’s part to create a whole - therefore
suggesting a narrative that will unfold.”
 Christopher
Chiappa
High fructose corn syrup
“describe a personal narrative on the loss
of innocence. It’s sort of all a big self-
portrait somehow, from the obvious
pieces that have me in them, to the other
pieces that are more philosophical self-
portraits
 Ngaun
A beautiful tension:
 Strategies
• Creating a series
• Having a sequence
• Integrating text
• Having a text element as a diptych
• Juxtaposition
• Constructing/reimaging
• Adding sound via installation/headphones
• Multiple or double exposures
• Performance
• Uniting disconnected objects into a new scenario
• Having a beginning, middle and end
 TASK:

• Using 1 or 2 of the strategies mentioned,

use the time now to create a narrative using
objects and environments on RMIT campus
under time constraint and see what you
come up with: