During this assignment, students chose and brought along a number of photographs, put them in conceptual order to create a narrative of the images and wrote a story to accompany the pictures.
2011 / The task was performed by students of the photography class in Sally Art School in spring 2011.
A narrative can refer to several important aspects of human psychology. A person´s sense of identity is created in a personal narrative process and so is memory. A human being needs a coherent and positive narrative to stay mentally stable. A narrative is a way for a person to find links between cause and consequence, oneself and the world, to explain to oneself the process of living. Due to these reasons and more, a human being is always a narrator who strives for comprehensity.
Aim
The aim of this assignment was to discover and discuss the links between photography and text, also between images themselves. The narrating of photographs gives an insight to a deeper analysis of images, providing students with the skill to understand the complexity of the creation of different meanings in a photograph. The juxtaposing of text and image made it possible to illustrate how the two influence each other.
Process
– Collective brainstorming on the nature of a narrative
– Printing of the photos
– Choosing of the images
– Narration of the photographs
– Writing of the story
– Reviewing of the narratives and the assignment on the whole
I had my students to bring a large amount of photographs to me without them having any idea of the forecoming assignment. I think that the assignment works best with random images.
Materials needed
– Cameras
– A printer
– Paper
– Images
When conducted with full concentration, the assignment should take about two or three academic hours.
