Cotton Chapter 2 Summary

Chapter 2 of Charlotte Cotton's The Photograph as Contemporary Art, entitled "Once Upon a Time," looks at storytelling within art photography. Specifically, Cotton concentrates on what is called "tableau" photography, or photography within which pictorial narrative is focused into a single image, a stand-alone picture. The works depicted in this chapter exhibit scenes that are carefully designed and choreographed by the photographer to create such narrative images. Examples of photographers who stage these images include Jeff Wall and Gregory Crewdson, whose elaborate photos display highly preconceived, incredibly labor-intensive sets with the narrative quality found in tableau photography. Sometimes, tableau photography draws from specific historical imagery or cultural codes for their narratives (such as the works of Sam Taylor-Wood and Tom Hunter); other times, it relies less on this and instead portrays much more ambiguous, unreferenced narratives. Tableau photography does not always require the presence of human subjects. These kinds of photographs encourage the viewer to piece together the narrative by tracing the thoughts and actions left behind by humans.