Narrative Workshop

We began the session in small groups. There were nine different categories and we were given images in order to choose nine and crop accordingly. These included specifications like close up of detail, crop to abstract and narrow vertical etc…

Here is the work of my group...

And a couple of Close-ups..

Looking back on the cropping exercise, it’s interesting to see how looking at a picture with the view of manipulating it, makes one more aware of the image as a whole. I had not paid attention to the minute details of each image and through learning about cropping, I am now more aware of the smaller yet significant aspects of images when I view them.

For the next part of the workshop we began to work individually. We had to use our newspapers that we had brought to the session to create two narrative sequences on the sequence sheets provided. These also had to fall into specific categories, eg: Moment to moment, Scene to scene, Aspect to aspect etc…

Here are some of my sequences…

I continued doing some more sequences at home and here is one of them. 

For a similar reason to the first task, I really enjoyed this activity. It really made me think about the images more deeply. I found myself selecting my images very carefully in order to portray the messages I intended. As a result, here too, I was really concentrating on the minute details of each image. 

The third task was also an individual task. We were asked to cut out every image, heading and subheading in our newspaper. We had to take four images and apply a heading or subheading to each image in order to assign a different meaning to it.

Here are the examples I produced.

   

This task opened my eyes to the fact that a lot of images can be misinterpreted without any text. It also made me realise that there are a lot of images that can be interpreted in different ways according to how the presenter of these images broadcast them. This means that the media is extremely vulnerable and in danger of containing bias material. I have seen from this workshop how easy it is to match an innocent image with a warped headline, presenting it with an unjust meaning. The scope for nuances that had not been intended seems to almost be limitless.Whether unintentionally or not, I think this is where misrepresentation sprouts from in the media. 




I really enjoyed this workshop as it taught me to look at images more closely. I am not used to looking at the minute details when faced with an image. I am slowly learning how to analyse and break down different images in order to put them to good use! It was actually really satisfying to find different and varied interpretations of each image and to have the chance to think more deeply about what I was looking at. 

To learn more about cropping, Click here.