Finding the story

As part of Advanced Editing in the Associate Degree of Professional Writing and Editing, I was asked to edit a chapter of a photobook and in that process, it crossed my mind that a reader and a viewer are one in the same. Words are simply a sequence of shapes that readers interpret meaning from and pictures are also a sequence of shapes that viewers interpret meaning from. In that case, it occurred to me that perhaps we can read a photograph in the same way that we read a paragraph.

Take the three photographs below. I came across them in my photographer’s project and it struck me that these three images make a triptych forming a single scene. Not only that, but this scene could have been written. The words came to me easily, like a prompt:

In a quiet street in the suburbs — regular house, wooden fence — a man sits outside, hands tucked away against the cold as he regards his work on the screen of a tablet balanced on a wheelie bin. Warm indoors, the dog looks outwards, a mysterious gaze sweeping the empty road, watching carefully for any suspicious incursion into the yard.

The composition is genius in the way it weaves the scene. Viewed in succession, the photos craft extra meaning out of what is essentially three pictures of the same thing. It’s even more interesting for how it subverts typical expectations: it is the man who sits outside to work while the dog sits inside, keeping watch over the yard.

Photos are capable of telling their own stories, free of all that pesky spelling and grammar. Problem is, you can read them however you like. It’s a struggle to try to look for one story when words aren’t even half the story. Yet that is the challenge our class was presented with when asked to work on this photobook.

With so many stories in so many photos, how do you just pick one? The obvious solution would be to not pick any, just write something very generic and then let all the photographs speak for themselves. The first piece of content I got back from my photographer was a document with a worded story, easy enough to work with but very light on details. A simple narrative about living life, then hunkering down for social restrictions and then slowly returning to regular social interaction. It’s a narrative, one that everybody in the country has right now. I was stuck for days thinking: ‘now what am I supposed to do with this?’ Technically, it’s not wrong and as an editor I have to try not to overstep my role as their support, even if I very much want to write something a lot more specific and with a sensible conclusion.

That is the hardest part about finding a story: figuring out what the ending is. In people’s daily lives, things happen and then keep happening. You hang out with a lot of friends. Then you spend days in your room forced to keep your distance. Then you’re allowed out with four other people. But you know there is more to come. People’s lives are a continuous march into an uncertain future. But stories are not like that. Stories end.

I started to realise why many authors advise finding the resolution first when plotting a story. Starting from the beginning, anything can happen and keep on happening, without a goal. And photographs can do the same, in a way. This man sitting in an office — or is it a living room, or a library? — seems to be at work, surrounded by all of his professional and personal things. Or maybe he’s not at work, maybe he’s playing games, who knows? Nature, anatomy, books and records, he’s framed as an academic, a post-colonial intellectual. Whatever he’s doing, wherever he’s doing it, the more you look the longer it continues. Free from time, this space exists to tell the viewer about the intellectual man at the computer, at the desk, among the books and the music. Marching on into forever. But when does he stop? When does he move? When does his life at the desk end and something else begins?

How does the story end? What is the point at which the reader will need to stop thinking about the future of this man, worrying about why he arrived and when he will leave and what he will do when that happens? In real life, that is all we do: worry about the future. But in a story, at some point the future stops being a burden. The narrative is resolved. The reader reaches the end.

And that’s what I needed to help my photographer find. I don’t know if I succeeded in that, though, and I probably won’t until I get to see the book. I wish I had more time and less issues in the midst of a pandemic to talk this out with my photographer as eloquently as I could here. I hope she’s found the thread the weaves all of her photographs together. I hope she’s found the end of it. It’s only when you’ve found the end of something that you realise you’ve found a story.

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