David Campbell: Narrative, power and responsibility

November 17, 2010 by osharpe

Attended a talk today with David Campbell and his ideas on the theories and issues surrounding narrative, he began with these two quotes:

“If your pictures aren’t good enough, you aren’t close enough.” – Robert Capa

“If your pictures aren’t good enough, you aren’t reading enough.” – Tod Papageorge

The talk was very thought provoking and I will try to get across some of the mentioned ideas and my own thoughts in this post. One of the big things I have been reading about recently, and it seems to be mentioned a lot, is ‘context’ and how important it is when telling a story. With an new age of technology everyone is becoming journalists and reporting news through the use of hand held cameras and twitter. This has its benefits but it seems we are creating empty documentaries, snap and go reports, not really engaging anymore with the story. To create a better narrative we need to better research what it is we are trying to say and develop an understanding of the story we are trying to tell.

The relationship between a story and ‘events’ is important, and we as practitioners provide the connection between the two. As Allen Feldman put it “The event is not what happens. The event is that which can be narrated.” Campbell described it using the french revolution, he said that people involved in the french revolution did not know that they were a part of the french revolution. The ‘french revolution’ was a term to describe the historic event after it had happened and, like many significant points in history, came to be through narration. With this is mind we should not be trying to find a narrative to document, but instead see that it is we that construct the narrative.

There are limits to narration (the obvious being you couldn’t write the assassination of J.F.K as a comedy for example) in that you can not have a narrative that includes everything, it can’t be ‘full’. You need to understand what you include and what you exclude and reflect upon these. Many people may give you their stories that may or may not be contradictory to one another, it is you that combines these into a narrative. Campbell went on to speak about the appeal of narratives, that they offer a coherence and purpose that life doesn’t offer. A narrative can make sense of life and people desire this, the power of narrative is that it is imaginary, taking real life and turning it into a coherent and structured story.

Context: “the circumstances that form the setting for an event, statement, or idea, and in terms of which it can be fully understood and assessed.”

Campbell mentioned ‘The Future of Context‘, for further reading and the conferences surrounding it, click the link to Jay Rosens article. The general argument is that the structure of todays news actually works against context in that there is a lack of understanding by the readers. Rosen starts by saying, “Suppose your laptop continually received updates to software that was never installed on your laptop”, basically what sells and feels good to publish as news leaves no room for the background explanation that is needed for readers to understand why what is being reported is news. Rosen explains “I was not informable because I lacked the necessary background knowledge to grasp what was being sent to me as news”.

Another point Campbell made was the importance of the relationship between individuals and context. You do not come across a HIV pandemic, what you do come across is people/places involved within that story that embody the issue. How do you use these things to reveal the larger issue, something Campbell said was common to hear from photojournalists was ‘I’m trying to put a face on the issue’. What is important is the story that you want to tell and having an idea about what that is before you start. You can not just turn up somewhere and start taking pictures, like mentioned at the start of the post, you need to research and know your subject, think about your story. What is the issue? What will the events be? Who are the characters? What is the context? By thinking about these things before you go you are guaranteed a better narrative. Campbell listed the classic structure for a narrative and the key moves featured within it, but stressed again and again that these aren’t the right way to create a narrative and they are not a template to be followed strictly, just that if you look at a narrative these things will usually be present.

Classic structure:

Exposition
Conflict
Climax
Resolution

Key moves:

Introduce location
Give it a face
Let the people tell their own story
Contextualize
Follow dramatic form
Use all channels to deliver the story

Campbell’s next point was on the ‘power’ of photography and narrative. There have been many iconic images through history and some powerful photographs. The example Campbell used was Huynh Cong ‘Nick’ Ut’s photograph of the girl running from her village after a napalm attack. The photograph was hailed years later as the reason behind the war ending. Campbell thought this to be a load of rubbish and justly so. The image had a massive social impact but did it change the world? not really. A bit like the french revolution example, Ut’s photo became iconic much later in history and as for ending the war…the war ended four years after Nick Ut had taken the photograph. The point Campbell was making was that a photograph realistically will not be able to change the world, but used in the right way it can make a difference.

Marcus Bleasdale after collaborating with comic artist Paul O’Connell and others got his work viewed by new audiences and set up an exhibition in Geneva inviting leading gold mining companies who were based locally. Metalor Technologies, after seeing the exhibition halted its purchases of Congolese gold. This was a ‘realistic expectation’ for the the work, it wasn’t going to end the war but it was reasonable to think it could make a difference.

This all fit rather nicely into the last bullet point in ‘key moves’ and a couple of quotes Campbell used will set us going.

“it is incumbent on photojournalists to make their work an effective medium for change.” Wendy Watriss

“…speak a language that the majority of our audience can understand.” Stuart Freedman

The responsibility we have as individual practitioners is great and thanks to the way the world is changing we have to adopt new ways of reaching the new generations. As Bleasdale puts it “the work of a photojournalist is connecting with new audiences in creative ways.” Articles I have read recently are highlighting the fact that new processes are needed in the delivery of narratives to new generations and to create a better context within the narrative to begin with. The articles were recommended by David Campbell, and what I found to be very insightful and interesting.

Marcus Bleasdale – The Impact of Images: First, They Must Be Seen

A Different Approach to Storytelling – A conversation with Brian Storm

Stuart Freedman – Ethics and photojournalism

Also beneficial to look at is the work of MediaStorm (of which brian storm is part) and David Campbell himself. Through collaboration with photographers they have produced multimedia pieces that do have a lot of context. It doesn’t seem enough now to have an image say what you want it too, the use of video and audio can add excitement and context to create narratives. A good example which Brian Storm mentions in the above article is that of “The Marlboro Marine’ a photograph by Luis Sinco that was massively misrepresented in the media and now has a touching multimedia narrative full of context contradictory to the initial thoughts surrounding the photograph.

For an audio file of the lecture please listen below: