Narrative Essay on a Photograph Text

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Completing the captcha proves you are a human and gives you temporary access to the web property. If you are on a personal connection, like at home, you can run an anti virus scan on your device to make sure it is not infected with malware. If you are at an office or shared network, you can ask the network administrator to run a scan across the network looking for misconfigured or infected devices. At night as the sandman sang his sweet song in your ear you could swear that the gaily wrapped parcel was singing in unison, murmuring open me first over and over again. The likeness was not taken at christmastime, but on an ordinary day which makes that day even more special to those involved.

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This photo rests within a white ceramic frame illuminated with two tiny, pink flowers with delicate green runners emanating outward on opposing sides of the frame. Daffodil eyes squinting in merriment, rosebud lips stretched to their outermost reaches, grasping for the sun, and cherry blossom cheeks glistening as with the morning dew: this is my daughter daisy. She beams at those surrounding her running circles about them with her laughter following in her wake. What a magnificent steed she has! she learns quickly how to control this beast and have it obey her slightest wishes. And, oh boy, what fun i'll have! such bittersweet memories as i gaze longingly at this photo. So i sit and ponder this picture, and as i do this those feelings come rushing back, leaving me with a feeling of innocence grasped once again. Of carefree days and warm summer nights with the fragrance of cherry blossoms on the wind.

23 feb 2016 storytelling and narrative are popular buzzwords among photographers, but photography and narrative are incompatible at a fundamental level. The obsession with storytelling overlooks photography's more practical and powerful uses. By mark meyer · march 24, 2014 · posted in: musings · media in a study published in psychology of women quarterly yes gentlemen, this should be on your nightstand , amanda diekman, mary mcdonald, and wendi gardner investigated practices surrounding safe sex, specifically condom use, as related by the modern romance novel. Unsurprisingly, they found that, consistent with the 'swept away' myth of spontaneous romance in these novels, condom use was infrequent, always suggested by the man, and often dismissed by the woman.

The surprising part of the study is that when they asked women about their reading habits they found that high levels of reading romance novels were associated with less positive attitudes, less past use, and diminished intent to use condoms in the future. Additionally, they showed that simple alterations to the novels to include safer practices changed the attitudes of readers. It would seem that the millions of dollars spent each year on public awareness and sex education are no match for a sultry dime store story.

But we knew that, right? the power of a story to evade mental defenses, change attitudes, engage emotions, and even convince people to believe patently false facts is common knowledge among advertisers and marketers. Because narratives effect us in such powerful and increasingly well studied ways, practically everyone in the business of communication is trying to capitalize on the trend by marketing themselves as storytellers. This movement has been especially noticeable among photographers where once we had lifestyle photographers, family photographers, advertising photographers, wedding photographers, we are now overrun with a large set of 'visual storytellers' and even some explicitly describing their craft as 'narrative photography.' as we will see, the photograph as a medium is almost completely incapable of expressing narrative. The 'narrative photograph' doesn't exist unless one is willing to stretch the definition of narrative to the point of losing its meaning. By describing photographs in terms of buzzwords like 'narrative' and 'storytelling' we undervalue the powerful role that photographs play in professional communications and their ability to complement narratives rather than express them and frame stories rather than tell them. Despite the simple underpinnings, narrative continues to fascinate theorists and critics because it is so closely intertwined with our identity and the way we understand ourselves and the world around us.

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As jerome bruner whose definition of narrative i've borrowed pointed out, narrative is irreducibly durative you can't have a narrative without a timeline. Narrative is almost always conveyed in the form: this happened…and then that happened, but it is almost always read: this happened…which caused that to happen. For example, it is almost impossible to read e.m forster's simple formula for a plot, the king died, and then the queen died of grief, without assuming that the queen's grief was the result of the king's death. Why else would they be mentioned in the same breath? but the causal link is our own it's not in the text.

For someone intent on persuasion, this is a free ride through the audience's natural skepticism because we are not tempted to counter argue our own inferences. Everything in a storyline can be unassailably true without having any causal relationship between events, but the listener or reader will still link them causally. This is why we see so many simple advertising narratives of the form: a retired couple walks down the beach, they are happy, they look wealthy and attractive, and they also take a particular prescription medication. If the ad had explicitly argued that taking a blood pressure pill would make you wealthy and attractive, it would encounter counter arguing, resistance, reactance, and probably a lawsuit. But the ad simply identifies a chain of events and lets our minds infer the causation.

Also, recent studies involving brain scanning have revealed that when we experience narratives, the areas of our brain associated with the activity in the narrative light up as if we were experiencing them ourselves. Studies have shown that the conflict resolution form of most stories releases dopamine which helps us remember the message, that narrative focuses our normally difficult to earn attention, narrative encourages emotional involvement…the list goes on for so long that you begin to wonder why one would attempt any sort of rhetorical or persuasive argument in a non narrative form. It should be clear why professional communicators are interested in wrapping their rhetoric in a narrative framework and, since it's become so popular, it's not surprising that photographers also want on the bandwagon.