Assignment 4 - Narrative Photography

With this assignment I wanted to look at a reasonably fundamental, but important, difference in the way that narratives can be told through a photograph or series of photographs. The two photographers I have chosen to illustrate this are Izima Kaoru and Anne Hardy.

Izima Kaoru uses the figure of a person within the scene to tell the story. Whilst at time he relies on the set and props to help the viewer to guess what has happened, largely the figure alone is the key to understanding the narrative. You can see this approach in his "Landscapes with a Corpse" series.

Izima Kaoru

Hasagawa Kyoko wears YSL, 2003

http://wearere.blogspot.com/2010_04_01_archive.html

Without the central figure, there would be nothing to suggest what had happened and there would be no real narrative. However, by careful positioning of the figure he encourages us to come to a conclusion on her manner of death and from there, perhaps, why. Whilst the background is important to give background and context to the event, he mainly tells the story through the figure. His style is very closely tied to fashion, as you may be able to tell from the fact that the title is the model's name and the clothes she is wearing. All of his photos (that I have seen so far) are of young, beautiful, dead girls and all are highly polished works that resemble the fashion style of photography. He has other works that use more of the set to tell the story but in general he seems to keep this to a minimum and restrict the narrative qualities mostly to his model.

Anne Hardy takes a very different approach. He images rarely involve a character directly. However, she indicates them via the scene in her images. These scenes are exceptionally carefully constructed to suggest both a narrative/story and usually something about the character who inhabited the scene at some point.

Cipher, 2007

Anne Hardy

http://www.escapeintolife.com/artist-watch/anne-hardy/

In Cipher, Hardy creates a scene which gave me the first impression of being an archealogical-type study due to the fact that many objects have been tagged. I suppose it could also be a forensic tag but there is no evidence of a disturbance or crime. These are just my personal thoughts on the image, but the way the scene is set it appears that the inhabitant has left, in no rush but without the inclination to tidy up. The weights and trophies scattered around indicate that the person is a champion weight lifter or athlete of some kind. There are other conclusions you can draw from the small details.

You can notice the difference between the two approaches - in Kaoru's image, the story is told by the figure and the background, while adding context, does not tell much of the narrative, while Hardy's image is almost entirely told through the background via carefully placed props and cues.