The role of ambiguity in visual communication

I’ve been interested in all forms of communication for as long as I remember. From songs, stories, poems, books, movies, photographs and other visual arts, I was always engaging in art and story. But not all forms of communication are the same. Anything but, in fact. Indeed, the differences are often greater than the similarities.

Take writing. Over a decade ago I undertook a communication degree at the University of  Technology Sydney (UTS), majoring in Writing & Contemporary Cultures. I absolutely love writing. It’s very specific. It’s full of details. It evokes imagination. It creates and peoples amazing worlds. During my degree I also took photography electives to rekindle my slightly lapsed but lifelong love of the static image as an art form.  And I found it was very interesting to study writing and photography at the same time. The differences intrigued me. They were so utterly at odds with one another.

A few years later I was again drawn into going back to school, this time to take a Diploma of Photography. I wanted to dig deeper into that form of communication as I had done as a teenager, only this time in a more structured way. To make a long story short, I thrived with this form of communication, and now enjoy it as much or more as writing. And here we get to my subject for today’s rant. More after the break…

What are the differences between photography and other forms of communication such as writing or movies? Movies, in many ways, and despite their visual form, share more with writing than they do with photography, but it’s probably fairer to say that movies inhabit a space of their own, sharing bits of both worlds. Stills photography is very dissimilar to writing, except for the fact they both tell stories. Photos however have very limited scope or space to tell the story. We could imagine the photo is the opening paragraph of the story. It sets the scene and gives us all sorts of detail, but only about a split moment in time. So how do we move the story forward – how do we introduce the plot? How do we continue on from the opening paragraph? Enter ambiguity. Let’s have a look at how ambiguity can be used in photography.

One of the major limitations in photography is that you have a single frame to tell a story. You have no supporting text, no context and very limited time to make your statement (they say at an exhibition, you have app. 3 seconds gaze per image). Now of course these are generalisations. There are such things as triptychs, photos do have titles and sometimes supporting essays, and context to boot. But generally, an image must stand alone and communicate its message in very quick time indeed. And with purely visual language. As with written language there are conventions, cliches, social understandings and other devices that can assist in the telling, but nonetheless, a photographer has to use an entirely different form of story telling to the author.

Ambiguity is one such way to draw the viewer in. As in writing, a truism is this:  Show, don’t tell. And surely it is better to show instead of patronisingly and all too specifically spell out the message. But that’s in writing. In photography, being overly detailed and specific is, in a sense, very difficult. One can rely too heavily on cliche perhaps to tell too simplistic a story, but with photography I often find the greater difficulty is in telling enough. A way I find that the best story tellers approach this difficulty in photography is to lead the viewer into a story but leave a large enough dose of ambiguity as to leaver the viewer caught up in the story but left, without resolution, to  stand and ponder the direction or possible outcome of the situation he or she finds himself engaged in. To reinforce the writing analogy it’s like writing a book with a great opening chapter which sets up the story and introduces us to the conflict at the heart of the tale, and then we turn the page to find… just blank pages.

So in a way, photographers need to learn to turn its greatest limitation into a strength. Instead of trying to tell the story as we would in traditional oral or written form, we need to use the greatest strength of visual imagery, which is clearly impact, to draw in our prey, lure and entice them with enough story to engage them, and then leave them floundering in front of the picture, forced to use their imagination to find some form of resolution or closure, before moving on.

To do this we need to leave some clues, some gaps, some elements open to interpretation to entice the viewer to begin to start to construct the story further in their head. We all love stories. They are a deep a part of us as anything. We just need something to latch on to to carry it forward. If it’s all told for us, then the story is over.

So leave a few clues, introduce some conflict or contradiction. Don’t spell it out too clearly, and let the viewer take a ride…

Let’s look at the image I posted at the top of the article. Whether or not it’s the best photo ever taken is not important (kidding, I definitely know it’s not the best photo ever taken.) But let’s analyse the story.

OK, what have we got here? We have a natural environment, right down to a naked women. The ONLY man made element in the frame is her wedding ring. (And yes it’s on her right hand – in some cultures, this is the hand used). What else we got. We have the water of course – lots of it. She is in the water, which in itself could signify lots of things. But she doesn’t look like she’s just taking a dip. She’s naked for starters. And she looks sad. Or troubled. She’s hugging herself and we can’t see her eyes. Is she crying? What has happened in her life? As I wrote on the caption of this shot at the top of the post, if you gave this a title, for example, Marriage, it would all by itself lead people towards a certain story line. Quite a different story no doubt than if we called it, say, “Cleansing”, which might lead us entirely down another path. But these titles only work as they do because there is a lot of ambiguity in the shot itself, and the story is hard to pin down.

Here’s another example. I call it Feet First.

Loads of ambiguity here. We can see that someone is lying down in a fire blackened forest. All we can see is their feet and legs. We can’t even see their upper torso or arms. Do they have any? Are they dead? Is it a man?  (probably, judging from the apparent size of the feet, and the way the jeans sit). What’s the significance of all this? And why in a forest? And what about all the regrowth? Is that supposed to tell us something?

I think a photo like this (one of my absolute favourites by the way and a Silver with Distinction winner at the 2007 APPA Awards) has got so much more to say by being ambiguous than if we could see a huge knife sticking out of him or something obvious like that. I didn’t want to constrain this photo into a straight-jacket of a story. I wanted people to be curious. Its original context was a folio called Still-Life and instead of having a title (Feet First) it had a quote beside it, as a way of leading people in. The quote was this:

“Life is a pilgrimage.
The wise man does not rest
by the roadside inns.
He marches direct to the
illimitable domain of eternal bliss,
his ultimate destination.”

Swami Sivananda

Not as ambiguous perhaps as some other text, but not specific enough either to know precisely what’s going on. OK, it’s very leading. And that was as it was meant to be.

So to recap. I consider ambiguity a very powerful tool to facilitate storytelling in photography. Use the visual impact of a photo to capture a viewer, using its ability to clearly show setting and initial story. Consider also using a title or quote to lead the viewer in a certain direction, and finally, whether you use a title or not,  make sure there’s enough ambiguity in the shot to give the viewer some room to construct the story further. Make sense? Hit me in the comments if you want to discuss it further.