Photographic Storytelling: A Poverty of Theory – Witness

I doubt I am alone in finding this simple sentence amongst the most enticing in the English language. It is laden with promise, and possibility. Almost anything could happen next. As photographers, we often think and speak of ourselves as storytellers, but our actual understanding of how stories work is woeful compared to other fields. Good storytelling is not something weinnately understand, we aren’t generally taught it, and most of us don’t go out of our way to learn it; at best, we pick up some understanding of it along the way, through trial and error. But even those rare people who actually have a robust working understanding of storytelling rarely seem able to articulate what it is they do when they create visual narratives. They just do it instinctively, as if by gut.