in a sense (different senses, i suppose), both apaflo and fad are perfectly correct.
floyd (apaflo) has supplied very clear quotations from winogrand on the subject, which are basically reiterating observations that barthes, benjamin, and nietzsche (among others) have made before. firstly, that in a strict sense since a single photo shows no development through time, it cannot contain within itself a narrative or story--which is defined as a series of interconnected events, cause and effect. secondly, and in a more general sense, as nietzsche says in 'the gay science', "we must have the courage to stop at the surface"--a resounding critique of the modern obsession with getting
behind what we see, or what is obvious, to insist that it must
mean something (and that meaning must be more important than the phenomena which is found to be merely a sign of something beyond it).
the first point might be illustrated by looking at a picture of a sunset. ...or is it a sunrise? how can we possibly know, without a second picture ordered in time? well, perhaps it is looking out to sea from manhattan, in which case we might know that it would have to be a sunrise, if we know the geography. but there's the rub: that knowledge isn't actually contained in the photo. strictly speaking, we bring that from outside the photo and interpret what we see in terms of what we (think we) know.
but what if we were to arrange for a photo to contain elements which somehow universally come to a known conclusion? perhaps a piano, caught in mid-air above a pedestrian on a city street. okay, probably it is not too much of a stretch to infer that the pedestrian is about to get squashed, and that sequence (piano falls; pedestrian squashed) is enough to make a narrative, albeit a simple one. it could be objected that the photo might be fake, or employ illusion to mislead us, but whether the narrative is true or not isn't the question; it is enough for it to simply convey any narrative at all (in a reliably repeatable fashion).
however, photos that actually qualify as containing a story by that strict sense are probably scarcer than hen's teeth. and actually existing photos point the way to another problem: even when a photo catches some event in the midst of inevitable progression, as a picture it may well function in an entirely different way. consider the famous portrait of
salvadore dali (dali atomicus); this is not a photo of the inevitability of falling.
for the second, it must be said that a photo is not worth 1000 words; it is simply a photo. words and photos are different. why do we insist that a photo should labor in the domain of text and language? jazz doesn't have to make sense; a cake doesn't have to mean anything. why not pay attention to the visual effects a photo produces--right there on the surface (and a photo is all surface, and all about surfaces)? consider
paul strand's famous white picket fence --said to have shaken steiglitz's conceptions of what photography was so fundamentally that it closed out camera work magazine. the graphic contrast would be simply garish and absurd in a painting; but in a photo it both creates a novel visual effect, and retains its link to the scene through the indexical magic of the camera. arguably, photography's highest calling is to seek and develop such photogenic phenomena--that is, things which are not only fundamentally visual in nature, but also characteristic of photography specifically.
but;
the pragmatics of photo viewing support frank's (fad) skepticism towards the rejection of story, if not necessarily his dismissal of winogrand. as sal and others did, when viewing a photograph it is not just natural but probably impossible to avoid letting one's preconceptions, habits, culture, etc shape what you see and how you experience that photo. and many photographers embrace some version of generic viewer, someone they can rely on to make certain assumptions and associations regarding their photographs. photos may not contain stories by themselves, but photos don't view themselves, either, and if there is one thing modern man agrees on it is the importance of story. (this is a whole 'nother can of worms. as an anthropologist, i can say that even if story in some sense is universal, the centrality of intelligible stories is far from ubiquitous; it is bound up in the hegemony of modernity itself.)
personally, it rubs me the wrong way when i hear, constantly, that photos need to tell stories. no, they really do not; they need to be interesting to look at. attaching a 'story' to a photo is basically just another version of a caption, which as barthes pointed out functions to police the image... and why would we want to do that? or at least, do we always need to do that?
part of what has been fascinating about reading the reactions to my 'rough corner' post above is precisely the variety and discrepancy of responses. i doubt we would be better off for all seeing exactly the same thing. (except, isn't that exactly what a photo offers?) even floyd can't keep himself from reading his own story into the photo, supposing that the girl could not have been menaced by the other kids, and that she was probably impeded by the photographer. (neither assumption is actually true, but either is an understandable [if sloppy--the smiling boy we can see isn't visible to the girl, and we don't see the other boy's expression, which was] interpretation of the picture.)
so by all means, let us be clear about the fact that photographs do not contain stories. but that will not stop people from seeing stories in photographs.
