It is common knowledge that a good photograph tells a story. Some go so far as to claim that “Every Photo Tells a Story.” More abstract photographs are surely exempted from this demand to tell a story. But what about other photographs? Do landscapes? Portraits? Astrophotography? Some, like street photography and documentary photography seem more like purveyors of stories. But what kind of story? And who composes that story? And for whom?
I want to try thinking about photographs as not telling a story but inviting the viewer to imagine a story. A photograph, in this way, doesn’t tell but rather asks. It encourages us to notice something and to try to explain it. Such a photograph asks us to reflect and to wonder.
A photograph is wonderfully and invitingly just a fragment of an infinite number of stories. We can use that fragment to reconstruct any number of those stories.