October 26 2006

Text By Meera Sethi

For quite some time, the Utata community has been mulling over the question of whether or not a photograph can tell a story. The conversation, to which we will probably keep coming back every now and then after another cup of tea, may never be finished. We’re still working out definitions and purposes and epistemologies and knocking back and forth over things like where a story lives, and whether it needs an ending, and if it’s the same thing as a narrative.

It’s the kind of chatter that I love, because it’s people who really care about words and meaning and art getting hot under the collar about the one thing that makes us incontrovertibly human: the storytelling impulse. You know the one; it makes you look for patterns and structure in every experience, turns your dreams into Cinema Verité, makes myths out of chaos. In fact, given how powerful that part of our nature is, maybe it’s worth asking whether it’s possible for a photograph not to tell a story.

This one is definitely telling me a story. The tale is a creepy one, gloriously so, and it’s about a sentient mind suddenly realizing it’s been trapped in the unyielding form of an inanimate body. Look at those marvelously expressive eyes. Tell me there isn’t at least a first chapter in them.

If this picture were a book, I would be pulling it off the science fiction shelf. And I wouldn’t be able to put it down until I reached the very last page.