Find a story to tell
The first stage of the process requires you to carefully consider what it is that you wish to say in your imagery
If you want to present a narrative through portraits, one of your first challenges is to find a story to tell. This might sound obvious, but you cannot take successful story-telling portraits without a clear idea of what you are trying to convey. While this should apply to any photo you take, it’s naturally even more important when you are dealing with the art of telling a story through your images. Of course, revealing a narrative through portraits often involves multiple images, and in order for those images to have cohesion as a body of work, they must share a particular vision, message, theme and style.
“Storytelling is an interesting subject – usually to tell a story you have three parts: a beginning, a middle and an end,” explains award-winning portrait photographer Tom Barnes. “With a single still photo it’s almost impossible to do this – you have to tell the story differently, and rather than a full story I think you are pin-pointing a moment from the grander story. Shooting a series, obviously, is much easier, as you are able to adhere to the usual story formats, but showing enough with a single image is a huge challenge.”
Sometimes, the story can simply be about the subject’s character. “As far as storytelling goes in my work, I’ve just always wanted to capture someone in their entirety, or as much as a still image can. I believe that the biggest compliment you can receive as a photographer is when a subject says ‘that’s me’ or ‘you captured me’; when I hear that I know I’m doing something right.”
Photographer Tom Oldham developed his award-winning project The Last of the Crooners around a desire for a specific story to be told, capturing singers at the Palm Tree pub. “The Last of The Crooners is a story told as a series of portraits and if anything, that amounts to my portrait of the pub. One image could never sum this place up, and I truly admire anyone who has that skill. I have a broad interest in the aesthetic of the place and have admired the details of the interior alongside the characters who have regularly performed for the best part of two decades, so for me to nail that in one frame would be impossible. If you have the access, you’d never use it to just create one image – it would make little sense to go no further than that.”