If you’ve ever heard me speak you know about my insistence that you must create images that tell stories. It doesn’t matter if it’s a commercial food photo, a senior portrait, sports action, a news feature, or a landscape panorama, it must tell a story.
Your images must be evocative. They must evoke a emotional response from the people who see them. What would be the purpose in showing photos that don’t?
In my newspaper days I always disliked page editors who only worried about making sure that the selected photo fit the news hole without concern about whether or not it contributed to completing the story told in words in an adjacent column or stood alone, a complete visual exposition of what happened at that fraction of a second.
The major tenet of news gathering and reporting is WWWWW&H. Who. What. When. Where. Why. How.
All six can be inquiries or descriptions. For photographers, they need to be both.
You begin every photo asking the six questions of yourself. The answers determine everything.
Run through my process for the above photo.
Who is the woman standing in front of the window of young dancers? Who are the dancers and why are they looking out the window?
What are they watching?
Why is the older woman here? Why is she looking a different direction than the girls? Why am I standing here? Why would anyone care?
Why did they come together at this moment at this place for what time?
How are they related? Are they related?
When and where did they come together?
The answers, or lack of clear answers, push you to explore deeper the same questions searching for an alignment of visual and emotional elements to create the photo that will force the viewer to ask the same questions.
Reporters, writing about an event, provide the answers for their readers. After reading a properly written news story, the reader should have all the questions answered. Perhaps in the first two paragraphs for the most necessary details. Additional paragraphs expand on the earlier narrow explanations, expanding the answers.
Photos don’t, and shouldn’t, answer these questions. They need to force the viewer to ask them, to inquire and analyze what they’re shown. Force them to an emotional point of inquiry. Compel the viewer to not only ask about the content, require them to engage their brains in an inquiry of WWWWW&H.
