ABSTRACT
Photojournalists and documentarists refer to themselves as visual storytellers and are largely acknowledged as such. Yet, epistemologically, photojournalistic photographs fall between classificatory chairs, for how can there be narrative without sequence or stories without words? With one of American photojournalist Lynsey Addario’s news photographs from Ukraine at its empirical centre, this chapter discusses some of the storytelling properties of photojournalistic still photographs and identifies three epistemological traps that visual narrative analysis needs to address to do justice to the specificities of the photographic language. These are the text trap, relative to the dominance of textual theory in studies of the visual, the truth trap, relative to journalistic practice and its ties to positivist notions of objectivity, and finally the temporality trap, relative to narrative theory’s focus on sequence as a prerequisite for narratives. The chapter argues that photographic narrative is pivotal in composite media stories, due to its ability to co-create complementary meaning across modalities. It further argues that still photographs may form narratives on their own, given their contextual ability to engage viewers’ emotional and reflective capacities.
