Leer en español: El abuso del storytelling en fotografía
Around 90% of photography websites contain the word “storytelling” at least once. If you look for a photographer today, whether for weddings, street, portraits or products, you will almost certainly find that word in their bio, in the title of their course or in their value proposition.
And yet, if you ask any of them exactly what story their photography tells, the answer tends to be vague or circular, if not an awkward silence.
Something does not add up.
The premise is a lie
The term is overused, but there is a more serious underlying problem: photography and narrative are, in essence, incompatible.
A story needs time: a sequence of events, a before and an after. Narrative, as the psychologist Jerome Bruner defines it, is irreducibly temporal. You cannot have a story without something happening over time.
A photograph, on the other hand, is an instant, a single frozen frame with no before and no after. It cannot narrate because it has no duration.
Mark Meyer put it bluntly in his essay Storytelling Photography Considered Harmful (2014), which remains the most lucid critique on the subject: by describing photographs with buzzwords like “narrative” and “storytelling” we undervalue what photography is capable of, which is something far more interesting than telling stories.
Susan Sontag (who, admittedly, says a lot of things) had already said it in On Photography: the ultimate wisdom of the photographic image is to say “there is the surface; now feel, intuit, what lies beyond it”. Photographs explain nothing. They are inexhaustible invitations to deduction, speculation and fantasy.
Instead of telling, they open.
Where the term comes from
It may sound like literature or cinema, but storytelling reached photography from corporate marketing.
In the early 2000s, large companies discovered that selling products as stories worked better than listing features. Steve Jobs was the master. Every Apple keynote was a story with villains, heroes and redemption. Storytelling became the holy grail of branding.
Commercial photography caught it by contagion, because it sounded good and deep, like something more than “I take pretty pictures”. In a saturated market, where thousands of photographers compete for the same clients, having a word that raised the work to the level of “narrative art” was an unbeatable marketing asset.
Along the way, the term lost any real meaning.
What photography can actually do
Cartier-Bresson never talked about storytelling; his subject was the decisive moment, the instant when form and content coincide in an unrepeatable fraction of a second. That instant contains everything without needing to tell a story.
There is something paradoxical about the most powerful photographs in history: they rarely tell what we think they tell. The famous photo of the sailor kissing the nurse in Times Square at the end of the Second World War became a symbol of joy and liberation. The documented reality behind that image was quite different. The narrative the public built had nothing to do with what happened.
The viewer supplied the story, and each one built their own.
An image like that acts as a mirror that gives viewers back their own experience, their loss or their joy, and that is far more powerful than storytelling.
A photograph that works artistically narrates nothing, but it resonates. And it resonates precisely because it does not try to, because it comes from a true place and not from a formula.
The real damage of the term
Besides being imprecise, storytelling as a photographic method does concrete damage: it trains photographers who construct instead of observe.
If you believe your job is to tell a story, you arrive at the frame with a script. You look for the character, the conflict, the resolution. You direct, however subtly. You wait for the moment that confirms what you had already decided to tell.
The result is images that explain, that are read and that produce an orderly intellectual response.
There is nothing wrong with that, but it is not the same as an image that hits you in the body before you can think, that stops you without your knowing why and leaves you uneasy, or calm, or with that nameless melancholy that appears in certain late-afternoon light.
A narrative formula is of little use for getting that visceral response. You have to reach a true place (your own, specific, intimate) and trust that this specificity will touch something universal in the viewer.
The more personal it is, the more it resonates, as long as you do not try to make it resonate.
It gets on my nerves
The next time someone tells you their photograph “tells a story”, ask them:
Is the story in the photo, or are you putting it there?
And if you need to explain the story for the viewer to see it (if the image does not work without its caption), then that story only exists in your head.
A photograph that needs to be explained in order to be felt never gets past being the illustration of an idea that did not fit in the frame.
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