A Tale of Two Images

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‘Photography unites the obvious and the unconscious at the level of the liminal - the border between what we see and what we suspect.’ Philip-Lorca diCorcia

I said yesterday that I would talk about of the bifurcation of representation in photography and the arts into the literal and the narrative. The quote cited - specifically referring to photography - sums this up so eloquently, I do so wish I'd penned it myself. I've talked about the power of liminal spaces in the past, and have talked about narrative and time in photographs before, so I thought I'd chuck out a couple of examples from my own meagre output to illustrate that borderland between seeing and inference.

Both pictures were shot by me in the late 1970s: the one at the top is titled "Chain & Anchor Works - Rowley Regis, 1978". The one at the bottom, "Waiting - Birmingham, 1978". The two carry very different narrative loads, one pretty much fixed and the other open to interpretation by the viewer to construct their own back story for the people depicted: particular the young woman at the focus of the second image. The couple walking centre-frame have their own story; and the image of urban life at that particular instant of time carries its own significance: the photograph is both a straight, momentary and historical depiction of rush-hour Birmingham at the time, and an open-ended fictive narrative of the observer's choosing.

As to the chain makers image, the story is far more literal, anchored by its title to its geographical location as if by map reference: its subject and purpose plainly depictive as an historical record of a by-then dying industry: the Black Country rapidly succumbing to modernity with the death of its traditional trades. Without the title, the image, although more difficult to place in context, still fits into a well established framework of photography as record. As to the other image, the title is a deliberate nudge towards an open invitation to fill the void with a narrative of one's own choosing. Storytelling without storytelling, so to speak. The very finest open narrative images, though, need no such nudging: the ambiguity of the images themselves creates a canvas for the imagination with no help from language.

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