Since the mid-1990's I've been engaged in storytelling. Literally. I
performed in front of live audiences, entertained listeners ranging from
preschoolers to nursing home residents, and regularly sought feedback and
critique from those who are considered masters of the craft.
For me, storytelling has always been more than providing entertainment to
an audience. I'm particular about the stories I choose to tell. I specialize in
what are called sacred tales from the Jewish tradition. These are stories from
the Jewish folk tradition, stories about the deeds of Jewish sages, and stories
authored and used by earlier rabbis and tellers to transmit a teaching. I
especially enjoy retelling Chasidic tales. I have a library comprised of
several shelves of anthologies and collections of sacred stories from the Jewish
and other traditions, and have a repertoire of perhaps three dozen stories to
which I frequently return, ranging in length from a compact ninety seconds to a
convoluted forty five minutes.
When I read a story for the first time, I know immediately whether it will
work for me as a teller. When I choose a particular story for telling, it has
to do something to me, to move me in a certain way, to invite me to spend some
time with it. If it's a story I want to learn, it will resonate for me in a
deep internal place. Telling stories is a spiritual practice for me, and to
repeat one of these selected tales is to experience wonder and awe each time I
perform it. There is something in the core of my being that the story taps into.
It makes me feel like I'm in the presence of something much bigger than myself.
If my telling connects with a listener, the story can also go deeply into the
soul of another person.
Some storytellers learn stories verbatim, like a script. I tend to learn
stories in a different way. I discovered I learn stories visually, and when I
perform them, my mind's eye reaches back into a special place where I've learned
to go and I verbalize what I "see" during the telling. I believe the most
effective storytellers are able to help their audience create these mental
images as well.
I guess this visual aspect of learning and performing accounts for my
attraction to another kind of art ... photography. I've been taking pictures
since I was in middle school, well over fifty years ago.
It's nothing new to hear people say that photography is a kind of
storytelling. But, for me, at least, I've had to get beyond the verbal
narrative aspect of storytelling to appreciate the full meaning of this, because
there is an obvious difference from the verbal story. In a narrated spoken or
written story, there's a linearity, a beginning, middle and end that unfolds
over the time it takes to tell the story. Photography happens in 1/60 or 1/250
or 1/4000 of a second. It's nearly instantaneous. Unless the photographer
deliberately creates the illusion of blurred movement, the photograph is a
frozen moment. Even the time exposure is frozen in the image, unchanging once
the exposure is complete.
So how does something that's frozen tell a story? It's easier to answer
this by experiencing it than by trying to explain it. Just look at the work of
photographers like Cartier-Bresson or Vivian Maier or Timothy O'Sullivan or
Andre Kertesz or Elliot Erwitt. Within the body of work ofany master
photographer there are images that make us pause, linger, and return repeatedly.
The images engage us without verbal narrative. In a single image, there is a
visual telling. The picture may be frozen, but what it communicates is
movement, action, relationship or the glancing touch of an emotion or feeling or
truth or irony. It puts a question into our mind and simultaneously gives us
what we need to answer it. The image pulls us in, holds our imagination, and
brings us someplace else, just like any well-told story.
A story that's effectively performed by a storyteller doesn't need an
explanation at the end to tell people what the story is about. Listeners will
get what the story is about in their own way. It's like the message is tailored
to custom fit each listener. Members of the audience leave with different
understandings, insights, feelings and experiences. For some it might be "aha,"
for others it might be "wow". They don't need to be told what this ought to be.
To do so is to insult their humanity and belittle their capacity for
imagination.
It's the same with photography, or any art for that matter. What's salient
is the engagement between the artist and the audience through the particular
medium. My experience with storytelling has taught me that a well told story
carries the audience along in a journey and there's a kind of energy that binds
the performer and the audience together. I experience that same thing when a
particular photograph engages me. I'm drawn into it. I keep going back to it.
It possesses a kind of magnetic attraction with something inside me. But my
journey is going to be different from another person's.
I don't need to be told what a photograph is about any more than I need to
be told what a story is about. If it works for me, I can figure that out
myself. If well crafted as an artful expression, it can do its own telling in
its own voice without any additional help from captions, artist statements, or
commentators. Next to a well crafted image, expressive of the photographic
artist's intent, such things are superfluous and patronizing.
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