Where is the story? How to edit a photobook
I have in front of me ninety-six pages of photographs. Photographs of people of all ages. On each page there is often someone new. Kids, teens, adults. Many of them are dancing. Some are doing a waltz, others a tango. But who are these people?
Suddenly it isn’t a photograph of a person but of a disembodied hand reaching for a platter of fruit. How does that relate to the other images? Does it belong?
There are paragraphs of text which offer some information about the images, but names and dates are just facts. Where is the elusive thread that links these beautifully captured images together? As the editor of these ninety something pages that will soon form a single photobook, I must seek out the answers to this question: Where is the story?
Much like a tourist exploring a foreign city, I began to examine the ‘locals’ in front of me. The people whose faces were captured by the photographer’s lens were strangers, and I had to make them familiar to the point of becoming ‘family’ to the reader.
People say a picture speaks a thousand words. But when you have nearly a hundred pictures in front of you, there is the danger of being left speechless.
So to organise these pictures into a coherent story, or narrative, was my task
The photograph on the left is of Codie, a teacher at the dance school known as MarShere Dance Studio. It is this school which was the photographer’s choice as the topic of their photo book. But it is the dancers within the school who captured my imagination.
I was given nearly five hundred words about Codie. Hidden among all this information was her story: why she became a dancer, what dancing means to her, and how she values her role as teacher. Did the rest of the words tell her story, or just serve to fill the page?
Like Codie, there were others whom the photographer had chosen to highlight with words about them.
There was Grace, a student in the Teens dance class. She had been dancing for six years, and towards the last few pages of the photobook, there is a photograph of Grace looking like a Hollywood starlet, in a sparkling dress, about to perform in front of the entire school at MarShere’s end of term ‘Golden Awards’.
The photographer had originally captioned Grace’s awards night photo by referring to her simply as a ‘dancer’. How could that be? Had the reader not become familiar with Grace by knowing details about her life in the earlier pages? So why enforce anonymity upon someone who is so clearly no longer a stranger?
These are just some of the questions I had to pose to the photographer whilst editing their photobook. My task of constructing a narrative out of the images and the words in front of me depended on making ‘characters’ out of as many faces on the pages as possible. This meant that names had to be used wherever possible, identifying the strangers in the photographs and making them appear more ‘human’.
We had to make readers care about these dancers, these teachers, otherwise what’s the point of them turning the page?
Zane is another prominent ‘character’ who is introduced as a teacher of both the Teens and the Adults dance classes. There are several photos in which he is the main focus. Yet initially, these were scattered all along the ninety-six pages, a choice that I found strange.
When you think of a novel that switches points of view between characters, it is often only at the end of the chapter when the switch happens. Rarely is it that only after a fleeting paragraph, a new character’s point of view is introduced. It is confusing for the reader and doesn’t allow room for natural character development and exposition to take place.
It was this concept I had in mind when I proposed to the photographer that they try to group Zane’s photos together, so that we see him in all his varied roles as teacher, mentor, and confidante. It soon became clear that this same method could be applied to Codie, Grace and all the other main characters who had multiple photos throughout the photobook. In this way, we could form a pattern which linked the photographs together, and which the reader could follow.
With so much content included in this photobook, the way I was able to make sense of it all ultimately came down to these three important steps.
1. Edit out what isn’t necessary to the character’s story
Less is more. It is a photobook after all, and the text is only there to give meaning to the images.
2. Use captions to identify characters and make them familiar to the reader
Use names, and be specific rather than generalising the subject or content of the images. Draw the reader in.
3. Link photographic images by their subject (i.e. the character)
When there are multiple photos of the same person or subject, group them together to create a pattern that readers can follow. Showcase all sides of the person to create a whole character, before switching to the next subject.
That’s all folks. Happy editing!
