Dial "P" for Panties: Narrative Photography in the 1990s

Afterimage, Jan, 2000 by Lucy Soutter

In literature, the term "narrative" applies not only to the story told, but also to the act of telling. Even when the content of a narrative is drawn from the world, the mode of presentation must differ perceptibly, if only slightly, from a pure imitation of real world events. Roland Barthes provides specific terminology for applying this distinction in photography. While Barthes insists on the mechanical objectivity of photographs, seeing them as a "message without a code," he also admits that in practice it is almost impossible to separate the literal denotative meaning of the image from its cultural connotations. [6] Even though a photograph is a direct copy of patterns of light and shadow in the world, it is also inflected by layers of convention and association. These codes constitute the style or "rhetoric" of the image, and give us a set of clues as to how to understand and classify it. [7] In Barthes's terms, the coding of a photograph enables it to tell a story, rather than merely record whatever la y in front of the camera at the moment of exposure. Thus just as a verbal statement might be read as a narrative if it began with the coded phrase, "Once upon a time," a Cindy Sherman Untitled Film Still might function as a narrative image if we recognize its visual codes as belonging to B-movies, or even if we read it more vaguely as seemingly stagy and deliberately artificial. Style, particularly when borrowed from a form dominated by narrative such as cinema, theater or history painting, is one of the most common tools used by photographers to generate a sense of narration in a still image.

According to Barthes, "Narration can only receive its meaning from the world which makes use of it." [8] Typically, those writing or speaking make their narrative intentions clear by presenting their statements in a particular constructed subjectivity or voice. The viewer's ability to comprehend photographic narratives depends largely on the photographer's ability to translate the concept of voice into visual terms. Photographers have some standard techniques for doing so. They can present a particular point of view (through distance from the subject, camera angle, type of film, lens, etc.) or a particular mood (via reference to a broad range of conventions of lighting, framing, gesture, etc.). But while writers have access to various kinds of narration--omniscient or limited, singular or plural--and can create a clear distance between themselves and the characters they construct to speak for them, photographers have the much harder task of demonstrating the separation between themselves and the enunciating subject of their image.

This is one reason why photographs so often fall prey to censorship--a novel narrated by a serial killer does not incriminate its author, but a staged photograph of violent or sexual acts is often seen as implicating the photographer. Without the subtle clues of linguistic positioning and distancing, we can only differentiate between the photographer and the narrator by making a conscious decision to do so.