Digital Stories

Diana
September 12, 2014
Garry Winogrand (American, 1928–1984). Los Angeles, 1980–83. Gelatin silver print. Posthumous print made by Thomas Consilvio in 1987 for the Museum of Modern Art, New York; The Garry Winogrand Archive, Center for Creative Photography, The University of Arizona

«Digital (dig·it·al)
/dijitil/
adjective

1. (of signals or data) expressed as series of the digits 0 and 1, typically represented by values of a physical quantity such as voltage or magnetic polarization.
1.1. relating to, using, or storing data or information in the form of digital signals. "digital TV"
1.2. involving or relating to the use of computer technology. "the digital revolution"

Story (sto·ry)
/stôrē/
noun; plural noun: stories

1. an account of imaginary or real people and events told for entertainment. "an adventure story"

And that's just what a photograph is, a digital story, right?»

A photograph, no matter the subject, often tells a story or, better yet, has a story to be told. Now, people could argue that there are times when a photograph simply just does not have a story to be told, and while I can see their point and understand why they would say that, I just can't fully agree. Honestly, on any other day, I'd say that every photo has a story. I'd say that sometimes in a photograph the "story" in question is being deliberately told by the subject. At other times, the subject's story might require you to look a little closer or have a little more background knowledge to be able to fully get it. Sometimes the story comes from the photographer, and is based on how he or she wants the photograph to be perceived and interpreted. A photographer may choose to provide accompanying text or a descriptive title to illuminate the photo or his or her intentions.

With Winogrand's photographs, it's as if that doesn't even apply to his work. Winogrand didn't feel the need to provide context for his photographs; the "story" simply just does not exist, there isn't one meant to be told. I feel that this may have partially been due to how Winogrand took his photographs. In contrast, New York City's very own Brandon Stanton, founder of Humans of New York, looks for the people he wants to photograph, asks them for their "story," and then shares them with the millions of people who follow him on social media. In Winogrand's day, there weren't smartphones connecting us to all sorts of social media platforms and search engines, which give us the ability to search and find things within seconds. Modern technology has caused us to become a more demanding and needy audience. The greater our access to information, the more we feel that photographs have more to them than meets the eye.

With this in mind, let's take a look at Winogrand's work for a second. His photograph of a Denny's, titled Los Angeles, doesn't provide enough information for us. We might want to know where specifically in Los Angeles he snapped this picture and whether that Denny's is still there; until we have all that information, the photograph's title just doesn't suffice for our needy curiosity. Winogrand is in fact the complete and total opposite of Brandon Stanton. He snapped his photos in the spur of the moment—a no-questions-asked kind of thing. He didn't know whether what he saw in person would fully translate into a photograph, and still that didn't stop him.

I think that's just the thing with Winogrand's photographs. He was taking photos as he saw things, not really looking for something deeper, like Brandon Stanton does. My views on whether a photograph always has to tell a story have been altered both by seeing Winogrand's work and by hearing from Jeff Rosenheim, curator in charge of the Museum's Department of Photographs and himself a student of Winogrand. As part of this summer's Digital Stories: Photography and Blogging workshop, Jeff Rosenheim took me and the other students on a tour of the Garry Winogrand exhibition. He recalled how Winogrand would tell him not to worry about the story behind the image. At first this struck me as odd, since I had always felt that a photograph needed to have a story, but as we kept walking through the galleries with Jeff talking about Winogrand and the type of person he was, I started to see that I didn't need the whole story, just what is in the photograph. But I wasn't yet fully convinced.

Diana. Empty Met, July 2014
Diana. Empty Met, July 2014

When it was time to write this blog post, I initially struggled with deciding what I would write about. I began by trying to write about how every photograph, even Winogrand's, has a story, but no matter how many times I drafted and redrafted my original idea, I saw that it just wasn't working for me. So I sat down and tried to figure out why I wasn't feeling as convinced as I was before that all photographs have stories, and it was because of what Jeff Rosenheim had said about Winogrand during the tour—the idea of not worrying about what the picture was trying to tell, but to just enjoy the image. I hadn't realized until that moment that that idea had stuck with me. I went back and forth between how I was now beginning to see the concept of a photograph's not always needing a story behind it, to how I used to see it while looking at the available photos of Winogrand's work on the Met's website. When you look at a photo Winogrand took, there is no story getting ready to be told; he was just doing what he loved, which was snapping pictures. If he wanted to take a picture of a lady's hair blowing against her face as she crossed a street in Los Angeles, it was because that's just what he wanted to do. It's an idea that's begun to trickle into my own work.

I guess what I'm trying to say is that I don't think that photographs are always without stories, but that some are and some just aren't, and it shouldn't matter. It's time for me to stop being a part of the demanding audience that always wants to know more and more and just enjoy the image for what it is.

Diana undefined

Diana was formerly a high school intern with the Museum's High School Internship Program and a participant in the 2014 Digital Stories workshop for teens ages 15 through 18.