Morris looks at (and reposts) a set of images of children’s toys strewn in the rubble of Lebanon—images that some reporters and bloggers have suggested are staged. He contacts the photographers, who are all with wire services, and ends up talking at length with Ben Curtis, the Associated Press’ Chief Photographer and Photo editor for the Middle East. Curtis is very forthcoming, and interesting thoughts emerge about the challenges of still photography and storytelling.

Storyboard looked at the problem of narrative and photography very briefly in a post last month about a gallery of wire service photos from an Athens riot. But Morris does an in-depth investigation of the issue here, a kind of continuation of his earlier extended essay, “The Case of the Inappropriate Alarm Clock.”

In the “Alarm Clock” series, Morris—who won an Oscar for his spare 2004 documentary The Fog of War—comments that:

 “We should be aware of how easily we can be manipulated by photographs. There is the idea that if we follow the rules… truth pops out like ice cubes from an ice-cube tray. These essays should serve as a reminder of how complicated and convoluted the relationship between a photograph and reality can be.”

The short take? Captions are everything. But Morris merits a full read, not only for visual storytellers, but also for reporters and editors who have to mix and match news sources when pairing visuals with written stories.

[Thanks to AP photographer Evan Vucci for drawing our attention to the latest Morris post.]

I would argue that the pictures as a whole, and even some single images, explore the story of the riots. But there is no clear order, no literary arc that moves toward a climax or transformation.

Associated Press

While video tends toward a classic, linear mode of storytelling, still images often work differently. In a prior interview with the Storyboard, Mitch Epstein, a photographer who has also done production design on films such as Salaam Bombay!, said that while photos can be arranged to create a narrative arc, a single photo

“is not the same as literary storytelling… an individual photo can suggest a narrative. It can imply a narrative. They’re better in a way at articulating questions than they are at delivering answers.”

Photojournalists I’ve asked in the past, like Ed Kashi, have said without hesitation that they were storytellers, though Kashi specifically mentioned the importance of accompanying words “to contextualize the images and give a deeper understanding of them.”

Which begs these questions: Can a single photo tell a story? Can a series of photos taken at different points or by different people, as with these shots of the Athens riots, tell a story? And how much context do they need?