Narrative

[pecunium]

I’m photographer, and I am, for all my wordiness here, there and everywhere, a very visual creature. So this story was pretty impressive.

A kid, at an Obama rally shares a sign with another kid; lets him hold it for a while, and then they hold it together.

Which is what happened, the pictures do tell the tale. But they also lie. Read the story, and then look at the photos again. If you look at the pictures, the white kid had the sign, and then shared it with the black kid.

Read the words and it’s the other way around. I don’t know why/how the images came to be in the order they are, but there’s a hidden narrative in it (and it can be read in several ways, some flattering, some not: I am not going to try to figure out the cause of the ordering which took place, because the person who originally posted it isn’t the one who took them, and the actual story wasn’t known until later.

But how things are selected is a huge part of the story which is told.

Comments

[vicious-wench.livejournal.com]

Actually, the story (as told in words) is ambiguous, and I'm not sure I'd necessarily attribute intent to the (apparent) discrepancy in order.

And all of a sudden they were sharing the sign back and forth.

It could very simply be that she didn't start taking photos until the sign had been exchanged at least once. That would explain the apparent order.

It does, however, tell a very specific story, without the backstory. As do so many things.

[pecunium.livejournal.com]

No, the story isn't ambiguous. The text very clearly says the black kid was holding the sign for hours, and then shared it.

And there was this kid at the rally, I think he was about six years old. He was black, and sitting up on his dad’s shoulders. He had an Obama-Biden sign, and for what I swear was about 3 hours straight, he held the sign straight up, with the most determined look I had ever seen on a six-year-old’s face. And then this other kid appeared,...

The photos, as arranged, say the white kid had the sign.

Someone arranged them that way. Did they do it by design? I doubt it, but it tells a very different story.

[vicious-wench.livejournal.com]

Ok, right -- the story in words is unambiguous, which is actually what I'd intended to type (but apparently my Monday is impeding my typing skills). My point was the latter -- did they do it by design? Were the pictures arranged, post hoc (with or without intent), or did the photographer just start shooting somewhere in the sequence, and this is the resulting series, starting from the first possible image?

My favorite part of the series, symbolically, is the simple fact that the parents had to move closer to allow the boys to share the sign.

[geekchick]

They appear to just be put together in the order that they appeared in the photographer's original set. I didn't see anything else in the photostream to indicate whether there are pictures of any previous exchanges or if this is just the point where she started taking pictures.

[pecunium.livejournal.com]

Which is fine, as I said I'm not trying to read intent to why the pictures ended up that way, just pointing out the power of narrative, and that the visual is really strong, probably stronger than the verbal.

[elisem.livejournal.com]

I noticed that.

Glad somebody else did.

I thought about saying in my LJ, when I posted a link to it, but decided to wait and see if anybody else said something. Because yeah.

[cakmpls.livejournal.com]

I noticed that, too, when I read the story, and had a similar reaction.