A $.10 narrative

If you listen to NPR, you know you can’t hear about Osama Bin Laden and go more than a few minutes without the word narrative smacking you in the face. It’s always just a stone’s throw away. If you don’t, then, well, now you know. What was the narrative? How do we offer an alternative narrative? What narratives are playing out? And that just goes to show that words aren’t a whole lot different than pictures. Trend-dominated, while trying to keep the masses at bay – we, whether that we is us as photographers, analysts, or anything else – are practitioners ever in pursuit of higher ground. We have to be better than the next guy, because the next guy is about to go out of business.

As Strunk and White say in the Elements of Style, “Do not be tempted by a twenty-dollar word when there is a ten-center handy.” How about story? That works, right? Except that a story is something you tell to a kid, and a narrative is something you say when you want to be an adult, when you need the world to know you are edumacated. Because who would wants to do all that fancy talk about political soft power and hard power if they’re just talking about a story? It’s gotta be a narrative, and that’s just the way it is. Pictures are words and words are pictures, and nothing changes from one medium to the next, because it’s us, the people, who are the constant. Don’t believe me? Read on.

I think narrative will burn out. It’s becoming so popular, it’s going to lose that sense of exclusivity – the cachet (that used to be a twenty-buck word, too – now I’d put it more around $5). It won’t hold as a word of the elite. It will be a word of the common, and common is just so common. So how about this:

I think tilted shots will burn out. It’s becoming so popular, it’s going to lose that sense of exclusivity – the cachet (that used to be a twenty-buck word, too – now I’d put it more around $5). It won’t hold as a picture of the elite. It will be a picture of the common, and common is just so common.

And we do remember tilted shots, right? R.I.P. In their defense, there were tilted shots, and there were tilted shots. The former being shots of dignity and documentary tradition, the latter being shots straight from 90’s glamour shots. Two genres never to confuse. But it hardly matters if you let your clients call the shots, and it only matters a little more if you don’t. After all, this is the age of me. Broadcast me. Show me. Let it all out, and see if it sticks. Nothing can be common now, because common doesn’t stick. Stand by your principles? Fuh-get about it. You’re still left high and dry, because everyone else just saturated the market. Doesn’t matter if you did it best.

In the modern world, how much is the twenty dollar picture worth? Exactly $19.90 more than the ten-cent one. Because the market is unquenchable – it craves the new. It demands change more than excellence. That $20 picture is going to be that much more showy, that much more spectacular, and that much more impressive. Show what you can do, right? Forget the dimes, and go for the cash and the cash-in, before they depreciate, as you depreciate.

But if you watch carefully and let the time pass, you’ll notice something. The ten-cent pictures never go away. They are compounded interest. They never die, they change, but largely by growing and getting better with age. There is nothing obvious in capturing them, so to do it well – to do them justice, you need skill. The real stuff that suffering is about. Feel the burn type suffering. You’re mind-building, here.

At ten cents a pop, you need vision. The basics make you a better photographer, because there’s no easy way out. It’s not some crazy use of space, it’s not some brand new way to use a flash that you just picked up from B&H. Impressing people through the basics is hard, because all you’re left with is the moment, the place, and your own force of observation. But if you can work it, you really make your way of seeing things shine. That’s something. Really something. And better than that, you come out of it a new person, fortified with fortitude and a way of seeing no one can ever take away. You make magic out of thin air.

So that’s the choice. To stay in or cash out. Shoot for the money or shoot for the message. If you can split the difference, maybe you can come out unscathed, but it’s a high wire act with your career on the line. Still, in this new world and this new new narrative, here’s a bit of good news. As we persist without ever an end, and as we endure with our souls on the line, answers may not be near, but salvation will never cost more than a dime.