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CHALLENGING THE ROLE OF PICTURES IN THE AMERICAN PRESS
Final thesis
Journalism Master (‘dagbladjournalistiek’) Rijksuniversiteit Groningen
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AND THE PHOTO ESSAY
THE PHOTO ESSAY
THE PHOTO ESSAY
THE PHOTO ESSAY
CHALLENGING THE ROLE OF PICTURES IN THE AMERICAN PRESS
Final thesis by Ieke Oud
S1332112
Journalism Master (‘dagbladjournalistiek’) Rijksuniversiteit Groningen
February 22, 2010
Dr. C.J. Peters Prof. dr. M.J. Broersma
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
Seventeen months of my life.
I would like to thank my supervisor, Chris Peters, for his helpful suggestions and critical eye.
I thank my parents for their continuing support and sponsoring.
TABLE OF CONTENTS
TABLE OF CONTENTS
TABLE OF CONTENTS
TABLE OF CONTENTS
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS ... 2 INTRODUCTION ... 41. THE SIGNIFICANCE OF THE VISUAL ... 13
1.1 The naturalness of the press photograph ... 16
1.2 The rhetoric of the image ... 21
1.3 The role of words in photographic messages ... 23
1.4 Narratives in photographs ... 27
2. PICTURES IN THE AMERICAN PRESS ... 31
2.1 Tracing the origins of American photojournalism: 1842-1880... 33
2.2 The growth of American photojournalism: 1880-1936 ... 35
2.3 Photographs as instruments of ‘objective’ journalism ... 37
2.4 Photojournalism as a respected profession ... 39
2.5 Differences between newspaper and magazine photography... 44
2.6 The emergence of the picture magazine ... 45
2.7 Luce’s innovative enterprise and the birth of Life... 47
3. LIFE AND ITS ‘PICTURE-MAGIC’ ... 53
3.1 The start of the magazine ... 54
3.2 Audience and circulation ... 56
3.3 Content and aesthetics ... 61
3.4 Editing text and photographs ... 66
4. LIFE AND THE IDIOM OF THE PHOTO ESSAY ... 70
4.1 Two photo essays: ‘Vassar’ and ‘Gwyned Filling’ ... 73
4.2 Challenging traditions of American journalism ... 75
4.3 The photo essay formula ... 82
4.4 The role of captions in photo essays ... 85
4.5 Narrative processes in single pictures ... 87
4.6 The photo essay: creating a coherent narrative ... 90
CONCLUSION ... 94
APPENDIX A – ‘VASSAR: A BRIGHT JEWEL IN U.S. EDUCATIONAL DIADEM’ BY ALFRED EISENSTAEDT .102 APPENDIX B – ‘THE PRIVATE LIFE OF GWYNED FILLING’ BY LEONARD MCCOMBE ...112
TABLE OF FIGURES ...126
INTRODUCTION
INTRODUCTION
INTRODUCTION
INTRODUCTION
When Frenchman Louis Daguerre discovered in the mid-1830s that images could be fixed on a polished silver mirror, he revolutionized the world of art. His daguerreotypes proved to be a significant development in the historical effort to ‘mirror’ the world through fixed images. There was however one drawback that soon ended Daguerre’s method: his images could not be reproduced. In June 1840, Englishman William Fox Talbot presented the paper negative, which enabled reproduction and would later become the foundation of modern photography.1
Ongoing discoveries and improved techniques made that the uses of photography expanded quickly. Near the end of the nineteenth century photography was no longer just a hugely popular artistic occupation; photographs became part of the printed press. A hundred years after the inventions by Daguerre and Talbot, photography had become a vital mass medium for bringing the news and ‘seeing the world’.
In November 1936, Life magazine was first published and instantly intrigued thousands of American families, according to its editors, for its bold presentation of news photography and its unique “sense of immediacy”.2 The number of copies
bought from newsstands was unprecedented and the letters of praise expressed much enthusiasm. “It is simply grand”, one reader complimented the editors, “so fascinating I just had to sit down and read it from cover to cover the minute it arrived.”3 Another Life enthusiast wrote: “Life almost makes still pictures move and
talk.”4
Life was the most popular and only weekly publication of photojournalism prior to
the Second World War.5 It would be America’s primary photojournalism magazine
until its demise in 1972. The magazine’s founders believed the magazine would change the world of pictorial publications radically. Founder and editor-in-chief of
1 Barbara London et al., Photography, 8th ed. (Upper Saddle River: Pearson Education, Inc., 2005),
386-70.
2 Norberto Angeletti and Alberto Oliva, Magazines that Make History: Their Origin, Development, and
Influence (Gainesville: University Press of Florida, 2004), 126.
3 Life December 7, 1936, 7. 4 Idem.
5 Wendy Kozol, Life’s America: Family and Nation in Postwar Photojournalism (Philadelphia: Temple
Life, Henry Robinson Luce, aimed at advancing “‘the art and function of pictorial
journalism’”, by working with the best staff, publishing the best pictures, and generating the best editorial ideas possible.6 He anticipated that there was a
prominent demand among the American public for a truly visual news experience. In the prospectus announcing the publication to his investors Luce predicted that “‘[t]o see, and to be shown, is now the will and new expectancy of half mankind.’”7
Life’s first issue had 96 pages and a print run of 466,000 copies. With a price of
just ten cents, copies were sold out within a few hours.8
As one of the founders of Time Inc. in 1922, Luce was a powerful mass media publisher. In the course of the 1930s he published the bestselling magazines Time,
Fortune, and Life, which became prototypes of modern magazine publishing, the
latter reaching millions of readers in America and overseas.9 While Life was not the
first magazine to make extensive use of photography ― Vanity Fair and National
Geographic, for example, were popular quarterlies that printed photos ― it is often
credited for being the starting point of a new genre of reporting, called photojournalism.10 The 1930s thus saw the rise of modern photojournalism. No
longer were photographs just illustrations that accompanied text. Instead, pictures became meaningful components of journalistic routines. Photographs conveyed a sense of objectivity, since they appeared to be neutral reflections of reality and lacked the traces of an author that drawn pictures did have.11 For that reason
photographs grew popular with newspaper and magazine publishers. Imagery in textual descriptions of news events and sites gradually declined, while photography took on the function of showing readers how a person or building looked.12
As the number and size of photographs in newspapers and magazines increased, their interrelations grew more complex.13 Some newspapers and magazines began
printing sequences of pictures and the picture story form (preludes to the later
6 Quoted in Loudon Wainwright, The Great American Magazine: An Inside History of LIFE (New York:
Alfred A. Knopf, 1986), 33.
7 Quoted in Angeletti and Oliva, 124. 8 Ibidem, 119.
9 John Tebbel and Mary Ellen Zuckerman, The Magazine in America 1741-1990 (New York and Oxford:
Oxford University Press, 1991), 158.
10 Ibidem, 227.
11 Kevin G. Barnhurst and John Nerone, The Form of News: A History (New York: Guilford Press,
2001), 138.
12 Kevin G. Barnhurst and John C. Nerone, ‘The President is Dead: American News Photography, and
the New Long Journalism’, in Picturing the Past: Media, History and Photography, eds. Bonnie Brennen and Hanno Hardt (Urbana and Chicago: University of Illinois Press, 1999), 89.
photo essay) was introduced in European publications.14 Moreover, as cinema
developed during the first decades of the twentieth century, Americans grew familiar with stories told though images. Luce’s Life magazine invigorated this eagerness for seeing instead of reading or hearing. Because of technological advancements (smaller cameras, new printing techniques), photography became a widespread tool for ‘capturing reality’, for both ordinary Americans and professional (photo)journalists.
But Life became renowned for one genre in photojournalism in particular. The photographic essay (or picture essay) was a genre of communication unique to Luce’s magazine. In a photo essay, a series of pictures was typically combined with text and captions, the words being largely secondary to the photographs. What resulted was a way of telling news stories that differed from the manner in which other magazines and newspapers published accounts. Luce claimed he intended to “edit pictures into a coherent story — to make an effective mosaic out of the fragmentary documents which pictures, past and present, are.”15 Instead of printing
words to tell a story, Life printed photographs. The magazine is accordingly celebrated as the first American magazine to publish photo essays, a new form that “expanded the scope of photojournalism and redefined the way we see”, for it combined several pictures in such a way that they together formed a message.16
While photo essays in book form were not uncommon, these were not widely consumed. Printing these essays in a popular magazine created an instant mass public of middle-class Americans.17
Luce and his editors published work from some of the world’s best photographers such as Alfred Eisenstaedt, Margaret Bourke-White, Robert Capa, and W. Eugene Smith. For many news photographers, making a photo essay was a personal goal. A way to show they could do more than make a good news photograph. Making a photo essay entailed coming up with an idea that had “depth, breadth and visual possibilities, then finding the subjects or locale where the idea can be translated into pictures, and finally taking the pictures and ordering them into a cohesive
14 Michael Carlebach, American Photojournalism Comes of Age (Washington: Smithsonian Institution
Press, 1997), 187
15 Dave Saunders, Direct Cinema: Observational Documentary and the Politics of the Sixties (London
and New York: Wallflower Press, 2007), 6.
16 Kenneth Kobré, Photojournalism: The Professionals’ Approach (Amsterdam etc.: Focal Press, 2004),
357.
17 See for example the photo essay You Have Seen Their Faces (1937) by Margaret Bourke-White and
whole, structured to tell a dramatic story in words and pictures.”18 And while Life’s
formula was imitated by a number of other pictorial magazines, in particular Look, these magazines never flourished, in both a creative and commercial sense, like
Life.
The introduction of photography in the press was stimulated by a widespread believe that photographs were ‘mirrors of reality’; they were thought to give a true reflection of the world in front of the camera lens.19 This belief in the truth of the
photograph led to an increase in the use of photography to convey news. Life’s use of a new genre in photojournalism, the photo essay, was significant, as it broke from traditional news storytelling in a unique and distinct manner. The photograph no longer functioned as an illustration decorating pages otherwise grey with text. Rather it expressed aspects of the news story that words could, or at least, did not express. For Life, photographs were key elements in ‘writing’ stories.
This study will analyze how this development opened up a different form of storytelling in printed journalism. In what way did the narrative style of Life’s photo essays challenge the dominant practices found in the American newspaper and magazine (photo)journalism of the 1930s? To help answer the main question, this thesis will address several issues. How did the photo essay depart from traditional journalistic practices and why, in retrospectives, is it often considered revolutionary?20 To what extent were Life’s photographic essays narratives? And
what function did the pictures play in crafting these narratives, and what was the significance of the accompanying words?
In answering these questions, this study brings together existing studies on 1930s (photo)journalism and Life magazine, and develops these further by incorporating theories on pictorial storytelling and visual grammar. The result is a more theoretically nuanced approach to analyze the workings of Life’s famed photo essays. Life magazine and its photo essays have been the subject of a number of
18 Howard Chapnick, The Truth Needs No Ally: Inside Photojournalism (Columbia: University of
Missouri Press, 1994), 35-36.
19 Robert L. Craig, ‘Fact, Public Opinion, and Persuasion: The Rise of the Visual in Journalism and
Advertising’, in Picturing the Past: Media, History, and Photography, eds. Bonnie Brennen and Hanno Hardt (Urbana and Chicago: University of Illinois Press, 1999), 50.
20 See Norberto Angeletti and Alberto Oliva, Magazines that Make History: Their Origin, Development,
and Influence (Gainesville: University Press of Florida, 2004), Wendy Kozol, Life’s America: Family and Nation in Postwar Photojournalism (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1994), and Loudon
studies. Kozol, for example, addresses Life’s way of promoting family values through its essays in the postwar decades.21 And Kobré provides a practical guide to
telling stories with pictures.22 Still, while the photo essay is often recalled as the
characteristic of Life’s photojournalism, the implications of this genre as a novel means of telling stories have been explored less.
The changing role of news pictures will be considered in depth in this thesis. This aspect of American journalism is examined in a number of other studies, for example that by Barnhurst and Nerone, who argue that the end of detailed imagery in textual newspaper accounts was related to the expanding role of photographs in these publications. By examining news reports of presidential deaths in office, they note that the “picture-as-content” took over many functions traditionally performed by texts.23 There are also many critical studies on press photography, which deal
with the memory of photographs, war photography, photographs as historical evidence, photography and the illusion of objectivity, and the prospects for photojournalism in the age of television and internet.24 However, few studies on
photojournalism analyze the structure of photographs and picture narratives, especially in terms of Life’s role in pioneering the photo essay genre.
For a long time, photographs were thought to be insufficient to produce comprehensive narrative. Until well into the twentieth century, there was a widespread belief that photographs could only visually illustrate parts of a story (like paintings did in the age before photography), while only language could construct a narrative. It was not until the 1920s, Baetens writes, that photos were used as “full-fledged narrative elements” in ‘high-art’ literary works, for example Man Ray’s avant-garde collage-novels.25 Still, there is debate about to what extent
pictures can be narratives. For example, an argument often heard is that while sentences can describe a development in time, a photograph can only portray one
21 Wendy Kozol, Life’s America: Family and Nation in Postwar Photojournalism (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1994).
22 Kenneth Kobré, Photojournalism: The Professionals’ Approach (Amsterdam etc.: Focal Press, 2004). 23 Barnhurst and Nerone, ‘The President is Dead’, 89.
24 See for example Barbie Zelizer, Remembering to Forget: Holocaust Memory through the Camera’s Eye
(Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1998), and ‘Death in Wartime: Photographs and the “Other War” in Afghanistan, The Harvard International Journal of Press/Politics 10 (2005) 3: 26-55. Alan Trachtenberg, ‘Through a Glass, Darkly: Photography and Cultural Memory’, Social Research 75 (2008) 1: 111-32. Marita Sturken, Tangled Memories: the Vietnam War, the AIDS Epidemic, and the Politics of
Remembering (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1997). Susan Sontag, On Photography (New
York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1977). Peter Howe, ‘Photojournalism at a Crossroads’, Nieman
Reports 55 (2001) 3: 25-26.
25 Jan Baetens, ‘Image and Narrativity’, in Routledge Encyclopedia of Narrative Theory, eds. David
instant of time. This strongly limits the narrative potential of images, some theorists argue.26 This thesis will reflect on several theories on narratives in pictures in an
attempt to assess the photo essay’s storytelling qualities compared to written narratives.
An influential theory on narratives is Barthes’s 1966 essay, in which he stresses the universality of narratives and refutes the idea that only written or spoken words can form narratives. Barthes argues that narratives can be
carried by articulated language, spoken or written, fixed or moving images, gestures, and the ordered mixture of all these substances; narrative is present in myth, legend, fable, tale, novella, epic, history, tragedy, drama, comedy, mime, painting (think of Carpaccio’s Saint Ursula), stained-glass windows, cinema, comics, news items, conversation. Moreover, under this almost infinite diversity of forms, narrative is present in every age, in place, in every society; it begins with the very history of mankind and there nowhere is nor has been a people without narrative.27
Barthes also analyzed the message press photographs convey, a “message without a code”, referring to the way these images are deceivingly natural, reflecting ‘reality’ seemingly without transforming it.28 Also, Barthes reflects upon the relations
between pictures and words, two structures that so often appear together in news accounts and reportages. These relations are essential as text and image are inherently connected in photo essays.
While it is an interesting debate as to whether single pictures can act as narratives, or to what extent they hold ‘narrativity’ – a term that refers to all qualities that make a narrative (e.g. plot development, chronology of events) – this thesis mainly addresses the narrative potential of picture series (e.g. photographic essays).29
Therefore, the analysis includes single photographs from a series, relations between photographs, and relations between text and photographs, as the written word is an essential tool in the making of a photo essay. In order to analyze the narrativity of a series of photographs, this study will rely on literature that analyses what elements are crucial to a visual work’s narrativity (e.g. Barthes). While a lot of academic
26 See for example Werner Wolf, ‘Pictorial Narrativity’, in Routledge Encyclopedia of Narrative Theory,
eds. David Herman et al. (London and New York: Routledge, 2005), 433.
27 Roland Barthes, Image-Music-Text, trans. Stephen Heath (Glasgow: William Collins Sons & Co. Ltd.,
1977), 79.
28 Ibidem, 16-17.
29 ‘Narrativity’, The International Society for the Study of Narrative,
attention has been focused on the narrative elements of written texts, the analysis of pictorial narratives has received less consideration.30 Besides, the genre has often
been handled not as a specific practice but rather as a reworking of verbal narration, analyzed from a literature theories framework.31 Some recent theorists
that have researched photographic narratives as a specific scheme include Baetens, Wolf and Ryan.32 This thesis builds on these works to analyze the Life photo essay
in particular.
Since Life magazine was introduced by Luce as a new way of seeing the world, it seems inevitable to incorporate the ‘old way of seeing’, in other words the traditions of 1930s American photojournalism, in this study. This study will reflect on the publishing and editorial motives in publishing an innovative magazine like Life. What did the editors think they were creating compared to American journalism at the time, and how did they conceptualize the photo essay?
To investigate these questions, samples of photo essays from the first fifteen years of Life (1936-1950) will be studied since the focus of this thesis is primarily on the pioneering role of Life in creating a new way for journalism to tell stories through photos. Moreover, Life’s popularity declined after the 1950s. The photo essay remained a key element of the magazine, but by then the form was well-established. Considering the scope of this thesis, only two essays will be dealt with in detail and the focus will be on the photographs more than the text. As will be seen, it is hard to determine which picture series were photo essays and which just photo series. For this reason, this study attempts to distinguish the uniqueness of Life’s photo essay from other instances of photojournalism, and will try to evaluate its development over the years by examining some of its best-known essays: ‘Vassar’ by Alfred Eisenstaedt and ‘Gwyned Filling’ by Leonard McCombe. Why these two essays are useful as exemplars of the Life photo essay form will be further clarified in chapter four.
30 Marie-Laure Ryan, ‘On the Theoretical Foundations of Transmedial Narratology’, in Narratology
Beyond Literary Criticism: Mediality, Disciplinarity, ed. Jan Christoph Meister (Berlin: De Gruyter,
2005), 1.
31 Mireille Ribière, ‘Guest Editorial’, in History of Photography 19 (1995) 4: 277.
32 See Jan Baetens, ‘Bibliography: Photo Narrative Today’, History of Photography: An International
Quarterly 19 (4), 312-13. Werner Wolf, ‘Narrative and Narrativity: A Narratological Reconceptualization
and Its Applicability to the Visual Arts’, Word & Image 19 (2003), 180-97. Marie-Laure Ryan, Narrative
Chapter one of this thesis begins with a discussion of various theoretical approaches that examine the significance of images in American news media and society. Several studies have analyzed how images, the press photograph in particular, communicate and how this differs from written news accounts in terms of veracity and rhetoric. Also, this first chapter will consider both a picture’s and picture series’ potential to form a narrative, in order to assess the manners in which the Life photo essay communicated stories.
The second chapter considers the introduction and characteristics of American news pictures. It will include a brief overview of the use of pictures and photography in American newspapers and magazines from the middle of the nineteenth century to the first quarter of the twentieth century. What was the role of pictures compared to and within written texts? Were editors eager to print photographs? And when can we speak of the use of pictures as photojournalism? In addition chapter two will address the birth of Life as a innovative picture magazine.
The third chapter will give a brief impression of the start and growth of Life, and it will analyze the change in photojournalism represented by Life. What did Luce have in mind for the magazine, and how did the editors attempt to realize his plans? More importantly, this chapter will consider how Life’s use of photojournalism differed from the way other print media used photography.
Chapter four examines some of Life’s well-known photographic essays. What is a photo essay? What did Life photo essays look like? Also, this final chapter will include a brief theoretical framework used specifically to analyze to what extent photo essays are narrative and how this narrativity differs from written news stories that may use pictures as illustration only. This chapter answers questions like: What is a narrative and narrativity? What are the relations between written text and pictures, and why are these relations significant? Hopefully, this will provide a clear analysis on photo series and narrativity.
substantial amount of text. ‘A picture is worth a thousand words’, is an often heard aphorism, referring to the ability of single images to describe complex stories. Whether one picture can actually replace a large amount of text remains to be seen.
1.
1.
1.
1. THE SIGNIFICANCE OF
THE SIGNIFICANCE OF
THE SIGNIFICANCE OF
THE SIGNIFICANCE OF THE VISUAL
THE VISUAL
THE VISUAL
THE VISUAL
A THEORETICAL FRAME FOR ANALYZING PRESS PHOTOGRAPHY
One’s first encounter with the photographic inventory of ultimate horror is a kind of revelation, the prototypically modern revelation: a negative epiphany. For me, it was photographs of [Nazi concentration camps] Bergen-Belsen and Dachau which I came across by chance in a bookstore in Santa Monica in July 1945. Nothing I have seen – in photographs or in real life – ever cut me as sharply, deeply, instantaneously. […] They were only photographs – of an event I had scarcely heard of and could do nothing to affect, of suffering I could hardly imagine and could do nothing to relieve. When I looked at those photographs, something broke. Some limit had been reached, and not only that of horror; I felt irrevocably grieved, wounded, but a part of my feelings started to tighten; something went dead; something is still crying.
Susan Sontag, On Photography.33
In the summer of 1945, after the Allied forces had freed the European continent of the Nazi regime and liberated the concentration camps, many Americans for the first time saw photographs revealing the brutal realities of World War II. In the years preceding the liberation of the camps, American journalists were reticent in reporting what atrocities were taking place in the camps.34 They believed the stories
they heard and the hints they received to be false or exaggerated, and related atrocity stories to government propaganda. Violent incidents are a given in every war, the general thought was. Even though reporters in Nazi-ruled Europe heard stories of brutality (they were not allowed into the camps prior to liberation), their accounts were discredited in the U.S. By 1943, a third of the respondents to a U.S. Gallup poll waved off the reports of the destruction of two million Jews.35
War photography – from Mathew Brady’s Civil War pictures to the Abu Ghraib prison photographs of 2004 – has historically underscored the role of photography in documenting agony where words alone proved insufficient. Zelizer’s extensive analysis on the role of photography in remembering World War II atrocities demonstrates that verbal accounts of the horrific events in the Nazi camps proved hard to believe, for the scale and nature of the atrocities were for many readers
33 Susan Sontag, On Photography (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1977), 19-20. 34 Zelizer, Remembering to Forget, 39.
simply unimaginable. Reporters and eyewitnesses of brutal acts were aware of this and wished they had photographs to verify their stories.36 Moreover, those few
photographs that were published were mostly generic depictions of war rather than photographs carrying identifiable dates, places and persons. They often lacked specific captions and credits and were printed in no direct relation to the text.37
Though such pictures had a definite symbolic value – reminding its viewers of universal but non-specific suffering – as historical documents they were imprecise.
When, on April 11, 1945, reporters and photographers accompanied the Allies into the Buchenwald labor camp, the scale of the genocide finally began to come into focus. At this point images made all the difference, even though they provided a glance only at the final phase following years of torture.38 Photographs – large
numbers were made and printed in the U.S. press – were recognized as “instrumental to the broader aim of enlightening the Western world about what the Nazis had done. When [General] Eisenhower proclaimed ‘let the world see’, he implicitly called upon photographs to help him accomplish that aim.”39 Photographs
furnished evidence and had effects different than words. As Zelizer explains, photographs “captured the atrocities in an explicit, and therefore potentially persuasive manner and appeared to intervene less with the target of depiction than did words.”40 They come to us in a direct and seemingly authentic form.
Moreover, photographs have the ability to stay engraved in our memories, more so or longer than texts. Photography has been associated with memory ever since the emergence of the first daguerreotypes, which were named ‘mirrors with a memory’.41
What is most significant about the invention of photography is, according to Sontag, its ability to linger in our heads, like an “anthology of images.”42 Many press
photographs, such as those of soldiers raising an American flag on Iwo Jima, the shooting of Lee Harvey Oswald, or the student on Tiananmen Square facing a row of tanks, have become part of our cultural memory. They have become symbolic of historical events, places and persons and form static representations that produce cultural memory.
36 Zelizer, Remembering to Forget, 43.
37 Barbie Zelizer, ‘Holocaust Photography, Then and Now’, in Picturing the Past: Media, History and
Photography (Urbana and Chicago: University of Illinois Press, 1999), 103.
38 Ibidem,105. 39 Ibidem, 105. 40 Ibidem, 106.
At the same time though, they can function as instruments for memory loss, obliterating personal reminiscences “through the power of their presence.”43 In
other words, looking at a photograph can lead to a replacement of recollections by the memory represented in the picture. Photographs can instill memories where none could have existed; the Holocaust pictures have created in people’s minds recollections of events that they never witnessed. On the other hand, photographs can replace or rewrite ‘authentic’ personal memories with what Freud has called ‘screen memories’. In fact, Freud claimed that most, if not all, early childhood memories are created during later periods in our lives.44 Looking over family albums
may thus alter original memories of our life past, or create memories where there were none prior to seeing the photograph.
From these observations follows the notion that pictures affect viewers different than words affect readers. But what explains this difference? Is the message they represent different from that of the written text, or do they ‘speak different languages’? The purpose of this chapter will be to explore past and present premises about the qualities of imagery, and photography in particular. What is a photographs relation to the ‘reality’ that it depicts? How do images convey messages, and how is this different from verbal communication? Do images have a grammar, like sentences do? And what happens when you print a series of interrelated photographs; can pictures tell a story the same way words can?
The question of how people produce and interpret meaning in verbal or visual means of communication has been taken up by numerous theorists expanding on Ferdinand de Saussure’s study of semiotics - the study of signs in language and the processes of meaning-making. From the 1930s on, the study of semiotics expanded to include the social processes and cultural conditions that shape the ways in which people communicate, acknowledging that power relations in society have an effect on the ways in which messages are coded. This field of ‘social semiotics’, which includes the works of Roland Barthes (1915-1980) and Michael Halliday (1925-), continues to provide the theoretical frameworks for scholars analyzing the production and understanding of meaning in text and image.45
43 Marita Sturken, Tangled Memories: the Vietnam War, the AIDS Epidemic, and the Politics of
Remembering (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1997), 20.
44 Ibidem, 22.
45 See for example Roland Barthes, Mythologies, transl. Annette Lavers (New York: Hill and Wang,
1972), and Michael Halliday and Ruqaiya Hasan, Language, Content, and Text: Aspects of Language in
1.1 The naturalness of the press photograph
“The press photograph is a message”, Barthes begins his essay “The photographic message”, deliberately excluding more artistic photographs (e.g. abstract, surreal) from his analysis. It is important to keep this distinction in mind, since the press photograph carries connotations that art photography and other images, like painting and illustration lack: it carries and attempts to convey a sense of mirroring reality, especially in the days of early photojournalism. As Zelizer contends, for most early twentieth century journalists, photography was “viewed as a medium not of symbolism, interpretation, generalizability, and universality but of denotation, recording, indexicality, and referentiality – the ability of photographs to ‘tell things as they are.’”46 When studying visual communication, it is important to take into
account three constituents of the meaning-making process of photography: the producer of the message, its transmitter, and its receiver.47 As this study reflects on
press photography in Life magazine, the sender would be Life’s staff (photographers, editors, technicians, writers). The transmitter is, in short, the set of magazine pages that ‘hold’ the message. This includes all photographs, titles, captions, and texts, as well as its lay-out and even the magazine’s title. Lastly, the receiver is the public which reads the magazine.
There is a definite difference in the general public’s anticipation and perception of press photographs and that of other forms of imagery. As mentioned previously, press photos were initially seen by publishers and public as literal copies of the ‘real world’ and gained a reputation of evidence of what happened ‘out there’. And still, while many members of the public are aware of the fact that it is quite easy to manipulate news photographs, they are commonly considered the visual medium that offers the most honest reflection of the real world; a photo “testifies to that which has been”.48 This testimonial appeal still is the main trait attributed to the
news photograph. And this ‘truth-value’ combined with photography’s symbolic strength is what Zelizer believes was and is the photograph’s power and what eventually made an end to the dominance of the written word in journalism.49
46 Zelizer, Remembering to Forget, 20. 47 Barthes, Image-Music-Text, 15. 48 Sturken, 21.
American writer and journalist Walter Lippmann anticipated the success of the press photograph when he remarked in 1922:
‘Photographs have the kind of authority over imagination today, which the printed word had yesterday, and the spoken word before that. They seem utterly real. They come, we imagine, directly to us, without human meddling, and they are the most effortless food for the mind conceivable’.50
It seems reasonable to claim that few people reading Life’s photo essays will have thought they were fictional, staged or manipulated. The power of its photographs lies in the impression that they are ‘natural’, as Mitchell explains such pictures are “related to what they depict in exactly (or roughly) the same way that vision is related to what we see.”51 Photography acquired a status as evidence, used in court
trials, government surveys (e.g. the Farm Security Administration), and newspapers and magazines as proof. Photographs, unlike verbal texts, paintings, and illustrations, have a particular authentic quality. Press photographs do not seem to be interpretations of a person or event, but what Sontag calls “miniatures of reality.”52 Life’s photographers and editors used techniques that reinforced the
naturalness of their photographs and photo essays, such as straightforward, descriptive captions. In the final chapter of this thesis, these techniques and their effects on the narrativity of Life’s photo essays will be examined.
Surely, this assumed veracity of photography is largely unjust, since in the same way that a painter decides how to paint a landscape, a photographer uses personal taste and formal standards to design how the picture should look.53 One of the most
printed Life photographers, W. Eugene Smith, wrote in 1948:
Those who believe that photographic reportage is ‘selective and objective, but cannot interpret the photographed subject matter,’ show a complete lack of understanding of the problems and the proper workings of this profession. The journalistic photographer can have no other than a personal approach; and it is impossible for him to be completely objective. Honest — yes. Objective — no.54
50 Quoted in Zelizer, Remembering to Forget, 9.
51 W.J.T. Mitchell, The Language of Images (Chicago and London: The University of Chicago Press,
1974), 234.
52 Sontag, 4. 53 Ibidem, 6-7.
54 ‘Eugene Smith – Photojournalism’, <http://www.jnevins.com/smithreading.htm> November 18,
Besides the input of the photographer, the role of the camera should not be ignored. Photographs by definition do not show what we would see without a camera, simply because the camera functions as one eye only. What we see with both eyes (angles, perspective, depth) cannot be recorded similarly by the camera. So, considering the subjective quality of both photographer and camera could lead to the conclusion that each “photograph (blown up, cropped, taken from a certain angle, lit in a certain way) misquotes reality”, as Manguel observes.55 Moreover, the notion of
what is ‘real’ depends on the definitions of reality of particular social groups. Today, we generally define our concept of what reality looks like according to the system of 35mm color photography or digital photography (though the digital aspect of today’s photography nourishes mistrust). But, for a long time including the heydays of Life, black and white photography was considered the most truthful representation of the ‘real’. In contrast, holograms are considered ‘more than real’, while they do reflect reality’s three-dimensional nature.56 But, as 3-D film and photography
advance, the notion of what represents reality best will almost certainly change over time.
Overall, the issue whether photographs are truthful reflections of reality or creative, subjective representations is not exceptionally relevant for the development of this thesis. Photographic delusion and deliberate manipulation is historically ever-present; from the early years of photography pictures were staged, people omitted from scenes in the process of printing, and light was added or deleted to (de-)emphasize elements. Moreover, one cannot deny the fact that every photo is framed, cropped, and sized the way the photographer or editor likes.57 What is at
stake is how the final printed photograph conveys meaning to its viewers, not so much whose story it is and whether it is objective or subjective. Though every person will attribute different connotations to a press photograph, one of the essential qualities of this kind of photography is that it is believed to represent something existent, rather than a fantasy or fiction. The question thus is what does the viewer see and how does that what the viewer sees create meaning?
55 Alberto Manguel, Reading Pictures: A History of Love and Hate (London: Bloomsbury, 2001), 73. 56 Gunther Kress and Theo van Leeuwen, Reading Images: The Grammar of Visual Design (London:
Routledge, 1996), 163.
57 Hany Farid, ‘Photography Changes What We Are Willing to Believe’, Click! Photography Changes
Everything (Smithsonian Photography Initiative), <http://click.si.edu/Story.aspx?story=178> October
As pointed out above, the press photograph has a strong overtone of being an objective, natural illustration of the ‘real’ event that took place in front of the camera. Still, the idea that a photograph is more objective than written or drawn accounts because it is made by a photographer carrying a camera, instead of a person with a pencil, has just been refuted. There thus seems to be a paradoxical relation between the photographic message and reality; on the one hand it seems a reflection of reality, but on the other hand it seems naïve to think there is no more to it.
This is why Barthes argues that the photographic message consists of two levels of meaning. First, a photograph is a literal reflection of that what is depicted; it is not reality but a perfect “analogon” of it.58 The picture is an uninterrupted portrayal of
reality, meaning it is not translated into a sign system (as happens when reality is translated into verbal language for example). This is what Barthes terms the “message without a code” and it differs from coded messages, such as paintings and films, which offer a second meaning. This second meaning is coded and what Barthes calls the “style” of the imitation, or “the manner in which the society to a certain extent communicates what it thinks of it.”59 In other words, a painting is
subjective because it is made not mechanically but by the hands of a person, and because its meaning depends on the ‘culture’ and subjective interpretation of those who view it. It carries a certain commonsense subjectivity that the press photograph seems to lack. Life’s editors helped sustain this notion on the photograph’s denotative power by asserting that their magazine would function “‘on the journalistic principle of reporting objectively the folk and folkways of the world - in pictures’” (emphasis added).60
However, the meaning of a press photograph does not end with the first-order message. The second-order message is on first sight not evident. Since the press photograph appears to be a “mechanical analogue of reality”, there seems to be no place for any other meaning. It appears as though the photograph contains a message without a code, because it transmits “information without forming it by means of discontinuous signs and rules of transformation,” as opposed to drawings, which are always coded, since they intervene with the objects depicted.61 The press
58 Barthes, Image-Music-Text, 17. 59 Idem.
photograph appears to have only this first-order (denoted, objective, natural) message; we are intended to see press photographs as literal reflections of reality, and a possible second-order meaning stays invisible. Yet, besides this ‘natural’ or denoted message, the photograph does contain a second, connoted message. Barthes explains,
[O]n the one hand, the press photograph is an object that has been worked on, chosen, composed, constructed, treated according to professional, aesthetic or ideological norms which are so many factors of connotation; while on the other, this same photograph is not only perceived, received, it is read, connected more or less consciously by the public that consumes it to a traditional stock of signs. Since every sign supposes a code, it is this code (of connotation) that one should try to establish.62
The photograph’s strong denotation gives the impression that there is only one possible meaning in the picture, literally that what is photographed, and masks the second level of meaning, its connotation. This connotation is, as Barthes claims, not visible at the level of the message, but embedded in the levels of production (selection, composition, etc.) and reception, where the viewer connects the signs in the picture to connotations that he or she recognizes. The photograph “seems transparent only because we know the code already, at least passively – but without knowing what it is we know, without having the means for talking about what it is we do when we read an image.”63 In short, visual communication is at all times
coded.
Seeing the world through photographs has a significant effect on the way we deal with information. As a photograph offers just one fragment of reality, it is up to the viewer to fill in the rest: context, relations to other events, people, beliefs. Borders and connections between events become subjective, because frames differ from person to person. This duality in messages of the photograph, the denoted and the connoted, is what Barthes calls “the photographic paradox”.64 On the one hand, the
photo contains a message without a code, the reflection of the real scene. On the other hand, this literal message is extended to make room for other meanings, connotation, formed by the interpretation of its viewers. What Barthes sees as paradoxical is the idea that a representation (not an interpretation) of reality leads to
62 Ibidem, 19.
a cultural interpretation, a coding of the message. A photograph would thus be both a natural and a cultural message.
For the purpose of this thesis, which is to look into the ways in which Life’s photo essays challenged traditional word-image roles and relationships in American printed press of the 1930s and 1940s, four closely-connected theoretical approaches will be addressed. All focus on the processes through which images make, obtain, and send messages, in relation to or opposed to verbal language. The remainder of this chapter will focus on the following matters: 1) the rhetorical potential of images; 2) the role of words in photographic messages; 3) the existence of a grammar of the visual; 4) the ability to form a narrative using images only.
1.2 The rhetoric of the image
Rhetoric, the art of using language effectively and persuasively, or as Plato says in the Phaedrus, “the art of winning the soul by discourse”, has historically been connected to writing and speech rather than other forms of communication, such as imagery. Breaking with this tradition, the academic study of visual rhetoric has emerged fairly recently, but builds on theories developed by social semioticians, like Barthes. The central question in studies exploring the ways in which visuals influence people’s thoughts and opinions is: “How do images act rhetorically upon viewers?”65 The field of visual rhetoric, however, goes further than visual semiotics,
including not only the process of sign-making and meaning of signs in images – the ‘vocabulary’ of images –, but also the mechanics of the visual language – its ‘grammar’. Before one can begin examining this ‘grammar’ of images, the way in which its ‘vocabulary’ comes together to form a meaningful whole, one needs to come to grips with the structure of the ‘vocabulary’ and the possible messages a picture can contain.
Generally speaking, images have a greater persuasive power than verbal texts. This is demonstrated by a theory from psychology that differentiates two forms of cognitive processing of a persuasive message: ‘systematic processing’ and ‘heuristic processing’. The former is a reflective, analytic, and responsive strategy, the latter occurs when a person uses a “shortcut decision-making rule” to respond to the
65 Charles A. Hill and Marguerite Helmers, eds. Defining Visual Rhetorics (Mahwah: Lawrence Erlbaum
message.66 Verbal texts are most likely to trigger systematic processing, while
images, because they are comprehended as a whole and often in one quick glance, trigger heuristic processing.67 The persuasive message in images is therefore more
direct.
Photographs differ from verbal accounts in that they have a more direct and evidential link to the person or object that is the subject. A photograph carries evidence of the existence of its subject; it is a reflection – whether manipulated or not – of real people, buildings, trees, etcetera.68 Words can represent fictional
persons and objects. Therefore they cannot provide the same unambiguous proof of the existence of its subject(s) as can pictures. This has implications for the way visual and verbal texts act rhetorically upon readers. Even though most of us will believe a verbal news account of an airplane crash just as much as the photograph showing the crashed plane, the photograph will likely “prompt a visceral, emotional response.”69 For this reason, charity organizations often try to persuade people to
donate by showing images of starving African children, rather than just reports disclosing the gravity of the situation.
Most of the studies in visual rhetoric that focus on photography deal with advertisements, since these images always have a deliberate signification and explicit purpose, selling a product or service by showing its best features in a way that, ideally, the reader picks up the intended message.70 Though the signification
in press photographs is less persuasive, resulting from the less explicit presence of signs, it is undoubtedly there.
But, since press photographs less deliberately impose a preferred interpretation upon the viewer its messages are open interpretation, more than advertising images are. Because the cultural signs in press photos are less overt, every viewer will fill in the blanks differently as if it literally were verbal texts filled with dotted lines. For this reason, Alberto Manguel warns that in reading pictures, our knowledge and personal perspectives often lead to misreadings:
66 Charles A. Hill, ‘The Psychology of Rhetorical Images’, in Defining Visual Rhetorics, eds. Charles A.
Hill and Marguerite Helmers (Mahwah and London: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates, 2004), 32.
67 Ibidem, 33. 68 Sturken 21. 69 Hill, 29-30.
‘When we read pictures – in fact, images of any kind, whether painted, sculpted, photographed, built or performed – we bring to them the temporal quality of narrative. We extend that which is limited by a frame to a before and an after, and through the craft of telling stories (whether of love or hate), we lend the immutable picture an infinite and inexhaustible life. […] We construct our story through echoes in other stories, through the illusion of self-reflection, through technical and historical knowledge, through gossip, reverie, prejudice, illumination, scruples, ingenuity, compassion, wit. No story elicited by an image is final or exclusive, and measures of correctness vary according to the same circumstances that give rise to the story itself’.71
Since the pictures we see generally give us little information on the ‘story behind the image’, we tend to form our own narratives from what we see. One photograph cannot express in unambiguous signs the reason for photographing the scene, the events/actions leading up to the situation in the picture, and the events/actions following. From a photograph of a war victim, we may make up what killed the person, but from the picture only we cannot understand what the war is about, what parties are involved, and how the organization of these parties looks, for example. A single photograph, Sontag argues, can never make us understand, but only “fill in blanks in our mental pictures of the present and past.”72 If we want to understand
what we see, we need a storyline. Helmers agrees that single paintings or photographs do not contain narratives, but are “static representations.” The viewer or reader must interpret the frame and add “dialogue and sequential action.”73
However, our narrative interpretations are heavily influenced by our cultural understandings and the interpretations of others; the notes of the artist on his work, captions complementing paintings in museums or photographs in a picture magazine.74 This leads to a crucial issue in analyzing the messages of photographs
and photo essays in particular: what role do the accompanying words (title, caption, article) have on the meaning of the whole text, images and words?
1.3 The role of words in photographic messages
Today, words are present in almost every image, as titles and captions, or as text balloons in comic strips. Press photographs have gained a more prominent place in
71 Quoted in Marguerite Helmers, ‘Framing the Fine Arts Through Rhetoric’, in Defining Visual
Rhetorics, eds. Charles A. Hill and Marguerite Helmers (Mahwah and London: Lawrence Erlbaum
Associates, 2004), 67.
newspapers and magazines, but never go without written text. Still, the relation between words and images has changed. For centuries, news pictures in Western culture were looked upon with suspicion, treated as secondary to verbal and written texts.75 In an 1846 poem, Englishman William Wordsworth lamented the first
publication of the Illustrated London News, the world’s first illustrated weekly newspaper, four years earlier. The use of illustrations for the coverage of news was in his eyes, and in those of many other intellectuals, a sin. In his poem he associates words with the progress of his country towards an “‘intellectual Land’”, and describes images as “‘dumb’”, taking England “‘back to childhood’”.76
In the 1930s, Marxist Walter Benjamin believed that without the guidance of a solid caption, the photograph would be of no use except for modish amusement. That it could only say ‘How beautiful’ even if the picture shows impoverished neighborhoods or polluted environments.77 Benjamin believed words would save
photographs from this fate of becoming merely enjoyable pictures, instead of meaningful messages. He wrote in 1931,
‘The illiterate of the future’ it has been said, ‘will not be the man who cannot read the alphabet, but the one who cannot take a photograph.’ But must we not also count as illiterate the photographer who cannot read his own pictures? Will not the caption become the most important component of the shot?78
Benjamin raised this question at a time when technological advancements in camera mechanics and printing techniques made it possible to print large numbers of photographs in newspapers and magazines. Did this lead to a reversal in roles of words and images? Would from then on pictures become the most salient elements of news stories and would words function only as ‘illustration’?
With the acceptance of the photograph as a genuine journalistic medium, the text-photograph order did change. Historically, pictures illustrated words. Until the start of the twentieth century, publishers thought pictures were useful as “curiosities, to attract readers as much as to inform them.”79 Photographs remained
a source of conflict for American newspaper editors until the 1940s. Photographers
75 Hill and Helmers, 2.
76 Quoted in Hill and Helmers, 3. 77 Sontag, 107.
were called ‘newspaper illustrators’ or ‘pictorial reporters’.80 In other words, the text
was supposed to bring the news; pictures were helpful to enhance the design of newspaper pages, but were content-wise seen as intruders. As photography became a respected part of journalism, images took on a role of content-carrier as well.81
According to Barthes, the press photograph “no longer illustrates the words; it is now the words which, structurally, are parasitic on the image.”82 In modern articles,
combining words and pictures, the photograph is often seen as the main element of the total message, carrying the most vital information. The text amplifies connotations present in the image, or adds to the denoted image other, cultural meanings.
Still, the photograph on its own provides an unstable and variable message, Barthes and others claim. Given that a photograph appears to be a neutral ‘codeless’ reflection of reality, its cultural signs are uncertain. Consequently, the meaning of the image is undecided. Barthes describes images as “polysemous; they imply, underlying their signifiers, a ‘floating chain’ of signifieds, the reader able to choose some and ignore others.”83 Images alone are too open to several meanings.
The words that go with the photograph, mostly captions, can solve this issue of meaning by providing verbal guidance to the viewer, for example by identifying the main elements in the picture. In other words, the linguistic message ‘anchors’ this chain of signifieds, to provide certainty when it comes to the meaning of signs. 84
Captions are therefore crucial elements in photojournalism. They ensure the viewer/reader understands from the image the message intended by the producer. This view grants much ideological power to the written word, and sees the verbal text still as the most significant element in the informational structure.
So far, texts and images have been presented as two structures of information. A distinction that has been institutionalized, in the press – printing photographs and text as separate units made and supervised by different people – and in schools – students have separate writing and photography classes.85 Barthes also sees the
totality of the representation as a combination of two separate structures: the visual
80 Zelizer, Remembering to Forget, 17.
81 For more on the role of press photographers and pictures in the press, see chapter two of this
thesis.
82 Barthes, Image-Music-Text, 25. 83 Ibidem, 39.
84 For examples of captions functioning as ‘anchorage’ see the discussion on the role of captions in
chapter four.
and the textual, which are “contiguous but not ‘homogenized’”.86 Relations between
words and pictures have been largely neglected in academic studies, Mitchell attests. Instead of looking at the interaction between words and images, we “‘insist on separating the study of texts and images from one another by rigid disciplinary boundaries.’”87 Mitchell sees the relation between verbal and visual language as a
constant exchange of meaning. Language in some form “usually enters the experience of viewing photography or of viewing anything else”, but the relation between photography and language should be seen “not as a structural matter of ‘levels’ or as a fluid exchange, but (to use Barthes’s term) as a site of ‘resistance.’”88
In photographs there is an ongoing struggle over meaning between the visual and verbal signs. The quality of this resistance varies; in photo essays that include large sections of verbal text, the struggle may be more evident than in photo essays which feature only trivial captions.
The assumption that photographs are a ‘floating chain of signifieds’ supports the idea that photographs are chaotic, unstructured messages. It makes them dependent on the grammar of the text to order this message. But do images not contain structuring of their own, a visual grammar?
Recently, scholars began exploring this question, looking at elements of (Western) visual design: color, perspective, framing, composition. Also, the field of visual grammar examines the relation between images and writing, for example in advertisements and newspapers. All these elements work to create meaning in images. And this is, in short, what can be called the grammar of images. Similarly to the structural rules directing the composition of words and sentences in any verbal language, images contain structural organization. Gunther Kress and Theo van Leeuwen have studied the grammar of visual design and disagree with Barthes’s assumption that images are always dependent on verbal messages. They believe Barthes misses one vital point: “the visual component of a text is an independently organized and structured message – connected with the verbal text, but in no way dependent on it; and similarly the other way around.”89 Images are
thus able to express solid messages, because internal structures influence the way we ‘read’ them, making one meaning more salient than another.
86 Barthes, Image-Music-Text, 16. 87 Quoted in Hill and Helmers, 2.
88 W.J.T. Mitchell, Picture Theory: Essays on Verbal and Visual Representation (Chicago and London:
The University of Chicago Press, 1994), 282-85.
By dissecting photographs, looking at composition, color, perspective, lines, contrast (between foreground and background), people and objects, Kress and Van Leeuwen point to the presence of narrative processes in images. They analyze the semiotic code of pictures by identifying interaction between participants and processes present in the image. Where verbal language uses verbs to indicate action, images contain elements (as simple as bodies or limbs for example) forming lines that realize comparable action processes. So, even though verbal and visual languages differ in potential – some messages can only be realized by verbal language, other messages need visual signs – both are structured and both are able to form complete messages on their own. A more detailed look at visual grammar will be included in the last chapter, using two Life photo essays as examples.
The theory of visual grammar thus holds that images alone are capable of showing narrative processes and a sense of action and development, though a narrative representation does not mean the picture contains a full story. This element of ‘narrativity’ is particularly interesting when looking at photo essays, since if one photograph can contain elements of narrativity, one would expect a series of photos to have an even greater potential to realize narratives. The last part of this chapter will therefore explore the possibilities of creating a narrative in photographs and photo essays.
1.4 Narratives in photographs
Theories about the relation between words and images, and the (in)ability of images to construct a narrative, have been around since the pre-photographic time. In 1776, Gotthold Ephraim Lessing attacked the idea that images (in this case paintings) could be narrative. According to Lessing, words and paintings had distinct functions: painting for description, words for narration. This presumption remained popular until mid-twentieth century, when the advance of mass media and the avant-garde ended the strict border between the two media.90 The
ideological distinction between high and low art – the image as illustration was considered a simple low art form, not to be used in serious high art literary works – was challenged and the use of images in narratives increased. In the Surrealist
90 Jan Baetens, ‘Image and Narrative’, in Routledge Encyclopedia of Narrative Theory, eds. David
literature of the 1920s, photographs were used as narrative elements, and artists like Man Ray used photographs in collage-novels to “provide information crucial for understanding the narrative itself.”91
Today, many critics claim that narrative is not reliant on the medium that carries it; it is ‘transmedial’, since narratives can be represented in different media, such as literature, painting, and photography.92 The narrative potential of photographs (and
other forms of images), however, varies from genre to genre and from picture to picture. Some photographs have absolutely zero narrative potential (think of abstract art), while other photographs are likely to realize some form of narrativity. For a medium to be qualified as ‘narrative’, it has to show some crucial features. Some of the core traits, so-called ‘narratemes’, that determine the narrativity of a painting or photograph are according to Wolf: the presence of a “possible world in which time and change play a vital role”, actors who experience change, and action or events that show this change; also, chronology, causality and teleology, are some narratemes that influence the strength of the narrative.93 If all core narratemes are
present in a picture, it seems fair to label it narrative; the absence of narratemes weakens a picture’s narrativity.
Text and image have historically been divided into two categories: “arts of time and arts of space.”94 Parna argues that this distinction, and thus the resulting rejection
of the notion of temporality in a picture, is inaccurate. Even though the combination of a fixed image and a temporal quality seems paradoxical, she claims that images can possess “both the qualities of a picture and those of a story.”95
Accordingly, the characteristic that greatly affects the narrativity of a medium is the “spatio-temporal extension”, as Ryan argues. 96 Some media are solely temporal
(expressing the dimension of time): verbal language is one of them. Media such as painting and photography are purely spatial (expressing the dimension of space). The photo essay, as a combination of photography and language, is therefore a ‘spatio-temporal’ medium. Temporal media are believed to be more suitable for
91 Ibidem, 237.
92 Werner Wolf, ‘Pictorial Narrativity’, in Routledge Encyclopedia of Narrative Theory, eds. David
Herman et al. (London and New York: Routledge, 2005), 431.
93 Wolf, ‘Narrative and Narrativity’, 189.
94 Karen Parna, “Narrative, Time and the Fixed Image”, in Time, Narrative and the Fixed Image, eds.
Mireille Ribière and Jan Baetens (Amsterdam: Rodopi, 2001), 29.
95 Parna, 29.
96 Marie-Laure Ryan, ‘Media and Narrative’ in Routledge Encyclopedia of Narrative Theory, eds. David
