16 | Snapshots and Storytelling

Oh how I love still photography. I have my dad largely to blame for that, but over time I've picked it up casually myself. I'd do a lot more of it too if I didn't have an uncanny talent of losing cameras...

David Griffin, Photography Director of National Geographic, did an amazing talk on TED on the power of photography to tell stories. We all have flashbulb memories: frozen images in our minds of remarkable events in our lives. These memories "tap not just to an event, but to an emotional connection" that we associate with that event. I believe it's certainly possible to construct that same emotional connection through carefully crafted imagery. I had the honor this summer of listening to Seth Resnick, another successful photographer, talk about how emotion in a picture will always connect to an audience. Needless to say, faces are very powerful transmitters. A single frame of a grieving mother or terrified solider speaks volumes to the viewer in ways that few other media comes close to.

Griffin says, "Even a snapshot can tell a powerful line of events, or what happens in between them." Look, for instance, at what Google Creative Lab did with the tech giant's first ever TV ad:

Team creative director Robert Wong says in response to the commercial, "if each search is representative of a moment in your life...then if you view a certain combination of those it becomes almost like a snapshot of that moment in your life...If you look at a photograph, you don't think about htat moment you had the camera in your hand and pressed the shutter, you think about what the photo is, what happened when it was taken." So a snapshot isn't necessarily a picture in the strictest terms.

Griffin's speech is centered around photojournalists' need to know how to create a compelling visual narrative. I argue that the same burden falls on advertisers, namely the creative forces within, and that we can learn much from still photographers. Our lives can be summed up in a series of well placed snapshots. Those snapshots may be in photograph form, but they may be something entirely, as Google displayed. This all goes to show that the most touching and moving stuff is not found via humongous budgets and campaigns with all the bells and whistles. It is found in the simplest forms: a moment in time frozen, brimming with emotion. A great story can be told with few or no words, and still carry across long distances and even cultures.