Jeremy H. Greenberg
- Jan 4, 2019
- 2 min read

Blog #139 One Photograph to Rule Them All

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📷📷 Intermediate

There’s an old English idiom that a picture is worth a thousand words. Some feel that when words don’t suffice, photography can express what words cannot. Photography is absolutely a form of art and art a form of human expression. So is dance, sculpture, music, poetry, and other art forms human expression. In fact, early cave drawings were a type of shared image that predated the first proper French image burned onto a metal plate. Cave drawings probably predated language or at least as we know it today.

One image can tell a story in a powerful manner. Sometimes a few images can be used to tell a story. How many images are needed? One? Three? Five? Twelve? For a good example of this idea, see LensWork’s Seeing in Sixes Projects online here. These are really like short series rather than a story, per se. Nevertheless, they are really terrific small sets of related images. Photojournalism (and documentary photography) is a type of visual storytelling. For more words on this topic, click here.

It’s a good exercise for any artist/photographer to practice. Try to tell a complete story with one or maybe a few images. The goal is to put the viewer “there” wherever that might happen to be and to communicate something about a person, object, or event. Some action will need to be observed to be taking place, or will have to have taken place.

Of course there will be some information missing from the images so that the viewer can fill in the blanks with their imagination. That’s the point! I’ve included one sample image only in this blog to try to go for the gold so to speak and illustrate that one image is all it takes sometimes.

What do you think this image is about? Try your own mini story project. Make three!

The light is always right.

JHG

*Images: © Limelight Limited

Where: Hong Kong

Subject: One image that tells a story

Gear: Fujifilm X-T1 + Fujifilm XF 16-55mm f/2.8 R WR

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