The Narrative Image

The Columbia spanning bridge at Astoria Well…just about one holiday ago, with my kayak strapped to my car, I headed back to Willapa Bay. This time I was determined to successfully use a tide table to help me safely cross over to Long Island while there was still actually water in the bay. However, once the weekend started in earnest, so did the rain. I don’t mind cool weather and a little bit of rain, but this spring’s prolonged rainfall, and the increasingly foreboding incidence of animal pairs traveling towards a single large boat in the Middle East made me reconsider my plan to maroon myself on an island. I wandered in and around the Long Beach peninsula for the better part of a day…but there was none of the frenzied clam killing that I witnessed the last time I visited. …just a long beach. I wasn’t very impressed with Jake, the Alligator Man, who resides at Marsh’s Free Museum. (I wonder if this is what Aldous Huxley meant when he used the word ‘pneu...

Imagine this. Suppose you have a growing collection of photographs and you need to make a portfolio that would be representative of your best work. Or say someone asked you to make a ‘coffee table book’. How would you pick the ‘best’ images? I can’t figure out how to do it. Inevitably, when ‘other’ people look at a given collection of photos, they always pick out favorites for reasons that can only be described as mysterious, questionable or ….just wrong. It goes way beyond the obvious to suggest that we all have personal preferences. Photos are seldom just artistic compositions – they are really more like snippets of memory. Most of us simply aren’t trained to subjugate our memories and the emotions they trigger for the sake of judging a picture by something as abstract as strong compositional design elements. Note to self: Maybe a good narrative image is one that combines snippets of memory with design elements to better preserve the emotional content of the…umm…sorry – ...