"Pictures and Photos Also Tell Stories"

 This essay was suggested by a friend and former high school classmate who is a skilled amateur photographer – a written essay that tries to convey the idea that stories can be told through pictures and photographs.

 

Sydney M. Williams

 

More Essays from Essex

“Pictures and Photos Also Tell Stories”

June 11, 2025

 

“The drawing shows me at one glance what might be spread over ten pages in a book.”

                                                                                                                                   Ivan Turgenev (1818-1883)

                                                                                                                                   Fathers and Sons, 1862

 

Drawings predate writing by almost 40,000 years. Among the earliest cave drawings are those in the Leang Tedongnge cave in a remote Indonesian valley. One drawing of a wild pig is estimated to be 45,000 years old. In contrast, the earliest known example of writing, on a tablet found in the Sumerian city of Kish, has been dated 3,500 BCE. The well-known Lascaux network of caves in the Dordogne region of southwest France, dating to 17,000-15,000 BCE, show elaborate hunting scenes. 

 

Johannes Gutenberg’s press was invented in the mid 15^th Century, which allowed words to be put on paper, so stories and histories could be readily passed on. But pictures remained a meaningful way of expressing a story. Leonardo’s da Vinci’s Last Supper was finished in 1498 and tells that story better than words could express. Tintoretto’s massive depiction of the Crucifixion, painted 70 years later, is mesmerizing in its sad tale of Jesus’ death.

 

The invention of photography – literally “drawing with light” –revolutionized the telling of stories with pictures. The photos of Matthew Brady, the father of photo journalism, along with the drawings of Thomas Nast, speak to the horrors of the Civil War. Erich Maria Remarque’s story of the brutality of World War One’s trench warfare in All Quiet on the Western Front is matched by the photographs of Ernest Brooks and William Rider-Rider.

 

John Steinbeck’s Grapes of Wrath brought the Depression to millions of readers, but Dorothea Lange’s haunting 1936 photograph of “migrant Mother” is remembered as well. World War II was brought into homes through the radio broadcasts of Edward R. Murrow, but also by way of the photographs of Margaret Bourke-White and Robert Capa in Life, and the cartoons of Bill Mauldin in Stars and Stripes.

 

Ansel Adams brought the U.S.A. to millions through his landscape views of the American west, photos that contributed to later conservation efforts. More recently, the TV series “A Day in the Life,” allowed millions of Americans to be a fly-on-the-wall observing distinctive individuals go about their daily lives. Drawings and photos of family and friends, of clouds and rock-outcroppings, of the flora and fauna that surround where we live bring a sense of security and joy to our lives. On my walls and tables are dozens of photographs that bring back to life the lives of those who have passed on.

 

Paintings, photographs, architecture, even movies, are not a substitute for the written word, but all artists are observers, and they catch what they eye does not read. One cannot enter a cathedral or temple without thinking of the stories of those who preached and prayed there, as well as of those – frequently slaves – who built it. Artists, photographers and artisans speak to our visual senses in a way words cannot.