Tag Archives: narrative in photography

Private Thoughts in Public Places

Private Thoughts in Public Places is a short (12 minute) video slideshow (with voices, music and subtitle text) which I prepared as a studio practice project for my studies at the ANU School or Art.

It aims to bring into stark relief the contrast between the ‘polite smalltalk’ of everyday conversation and the authentic inner dialogues that may be going on simultaneously. The ‘actors’ in the film portray people who are together in physical space – but isolated by the noise of their own inner worlds.

As the narrative progresses, the inner thoughts begin to leak out into the environment, with text appearing on signs, advertising billboards, graffiti – and eventually in the sky.

My intention was to explore storytelling through still photography, the presentation of photographs as a chronological sequence, the impact of incorporating text in visual imagery, showing motion with still images.

The project was planned as an investigation of several issues, each concerned with the viewer experience when presented with images in different ways:

• the impact of combining written text, spoken language and visual imagery;
• multiple related images presented in combination – adjacent versus consecutive presentation;
• the use of a sequential set of still images to present a narrative;
• the depiction of motion (both in time and space) through ‘still’ images;
• simultaneous presentation of different perspectives of a single event; and
• the (increasingly) ill-defined boundary between still and video imagery.

I really enjoyed this project, and anticipate doing more work in the future to further explore and develop the themes of this project. I think there’s more potential in the ‘private thoughts in public places’ concept, and in the projection of text into landscape images more generally. I’m also very interested in the use of variant media forms to package, present and deliver photographic images in different ways (to print, screen and web).

You can see a selection of still images from the project on the main Jokar web site by clicking on this link.