Telling stories
Writing a column, a caption or a blog post is not higher mathematics. To write something interesting you do not have to wait hours for inspiration or take long walks. If you really have to squeeze your story out, it may not be worth it. As a photographer you write with images, whether you are an interior photographer or a portrait photographer. It is not only the documentary or press photographer who documents a story. We all do.
Think of editorial photography or an editorial portrait: images that deliberately carry a story.
Whether your preference runs to that one tree on a heather-covered hill, or to catching someone’s character in a high contrast black and white portrait, you are writing a story. Your own visual story has to invite people to read it and to buy your photo book. I recently bought Images à la Sauvette (The Decisive Moment) by Henri Cartier-Bresson, because I find the story so beautiful. It is like a fairy tale about street photography, taking you back to a time of bowler hats and long coats, motorways without traffic jams and children looking at the camera in wonder. All over the world.
Looking for more of that kind of inspiration? I put together a list of photo books I recommend, and you can find my own books on a separate page.
You either write the story beside the photo, or you leave the viewer to invent it and pass it on. It is like the fairy tales of old, folk stories handed down to new generations by the fireside. We read a photo and go looking for its origin; what camera was used, how would he or she have arrived at that picture?
And yet I often see and speak to photographers who wrestle with text. That was already so when I advised people on website optimisation (SEO) at my previous company Yoast, of the plugin. “Write an accompanying text,” I would say to a photographer. And after considerable hesitation the wedding photographer would write a whirlwind account of the beautiful day. The story was already written, just not yet on paper. If you can talk for hours at a dinner about everything you have experienced, then you can tell stories, and translate them into columns, captions and blog posts. I am not saying anywhere that you have to, mind. Not at all.
I write intuitively, always. At six in the morning the alarm goes off and I open Instagram on my iPad. I carefully choose the photo of the day and start writing. The first sentence is about the photo. The rest comes as it comes, and I usually fill the caption right up to the maximum number of characters. Over the past few months a diary has taken shape, a modern fairy tale about someone going further and further into the swamp called photography. I do not write about the witches I meet, but I do write about the breadcrumbs that can no longer be found. The next step, the latest adventure. There is no map, but there is buried treasure. Tomorrow a new story appears, while I rub the sleep from my eyes.
Photography is a subject that lends itself to modern fairy tales. You get lost, and every place has its own stories. My king is called Stephan Vanfleteren, my fairy is Valérie Jardin. I regularly head out with the other six dwarfs, and alone in a city I feel like Nello wandering with Patrasche, seeking refuge in a church or a museum. Have a look at your own last photo. Which story did you want to tell? Did you tell it, or did you leave it all to the viewer? I am curious. Off you go and fill your book of fairy tales.
This article first appeared in Focus Magazine (the best photography magazine in the Netherlands), for which I wrote a column in every issue in 2023 and 2024.