Friday Photo: Storytelling by Omission
So today’s Friday Photo forms a companion piece to a previous blog post which you can read here Creative Storytelling and could very well go on to be part of a series with the working title: Storytelling Without Heads, or maybe The Talking Headless or some such thing. What I want to talk about here today is omission. The benefit of not having a head in the shot (however handsome or pretty or interesting those heads may be) is that the image instantly becomes more universal, less immediately part of the world in which it was taken. I mean it’s pretty rare that you would ever have a print from someone else’s wedding up on your wall if that image seemed to be about the particular moment and faces of that wedding. But without those indicators it becomes a stand alone image. Maybe even art…(!) And that’s because we’re wired to find faces so powerfully expressive it’s almost impossible not to read the mood of the face as the ultimate truth of the photo. Without a face however we’re freed up to look for other clues, bring our own version of events to the image, impose our own narrative. In short, without the face as powerful documentary mode the image is less contained and so is free to become a kind of personal fiction. We own our part in fiction in a way we don’t in straight documentary. Fiction inherently relies on our input, on our own imagination to give a thing it’s particular meaning. I actually strive to bring a certain universality to all my images, but without a head, without the emotion of the eyes and mouth (or the Oral and Maxillofacial markers for the more wordy pretentious out there among you — hello gang) the image becomes almost more relatable precisely by what is not there, rather than what is. But the bottom line about this image, beyond all the guff I feel required to write to justify its existence as a blog post, is, basically, it’s funny.
Technical details for the photography wonks:
Camera: Canon 5D MKIII
Lens: Canon 24-70mm 2.8
Aperture: f9
Shutter speed: 1/200
ISO: 800
Flash: Fired in Manual Mode