show, don’t tell

begin tangent I realized that I’m way overdue for a shooting tips (for moms) post, so here is one for you. Keep an eye out, too, as I have a couple exciting announcements to put up soon, like yesterday, about an upcoming event and an exciting new look! end tangent

You may not recognize this phrase (Show, Don’t Tell) if you didn’t go to middle/high school with me, although I feel fairly confident that it didn’t originate with Mrs. Brown. Who is Mrs. Brown? She was my English teacher in sixth and twelfth grades, and really focused on creative writing. Not photography, but as I shoot and explore photography, my mind keeps returning to Mrs. Brown’s recurring mantra: Show, Don’t Tell. I think this is because I really want to encourage you to look at photography as a kind of storytelling: it’s a story you’re writing about your children, your family, for the ones you love who are not with you or who don’t even exist yet.

So what does Show, Don’t Tell actually mean? It means that you have to allow your story, or your image in this case, to do the talking for you. I’ll put it in writing terms first and then try to unpack it with some pictures. I turned on my radio a couple weeks ago and caught the tail end of a Lake Wobegon story, told by master storyteller Garrison Keillor, who has the power to evoke laughter in one moment and then wring your heart the next. His story was about a New York dancer who was picking up his elderly parents at the airport. For fear of missing their flight, they’d gotten to the Minneapolis airport so early that they’d been put on an earlier flight instead, and had been waiting at the airport for a few hours already. Keillor painted this wonderful image with just a few words (forgive me if my words are not exact but this is my memory):

He saw his parents sitting in the airport diner, sharing a bowl of soup, leaning in to each other.

I heard those words and I immediately had this picture in my mind of decades of marriage, of comfort and quiet, of vein marbled hands, and a solid, enduring love. Keillor showed all this with this powerful visual image of two old people, leaning in to each other. Just imagine if, instead, he had said something like “His parents, who had been married for 47 years, still showed their love for each other by sharing many things, like their soup, and talking together.” Ew. That’s Telling, Not Showing.

Guess what? You can do that with your photography, too. Look for the emotion on your child’s face and get in close when she blows out the candles on her birthday cake. The story isn’t about the other five people around the table or the plates and napkins, it’s the look in her eyes and her puffed out cheeks as she blows.

How about at the beach? Try getting in and telling the story of your baby’s day at the beach. Get down low—show those sandy feet and lips (what, your kids don’t eat sand?). Show the details of his shovel.

One of the absolute best examples I have seen lately of this kind of photography—Show, Don’t Tell—was an image captured by Jen Mielbrecht at a wedding this summer. She sent me a handful of pictures in an email, all of which are lovely (you can see them on her blog here, and if you are in the Cincinnati area and looking for family pictures, give her a call), but this one stopped me cold. I begged for her permission to use it in this post. Just look at it:

This one image wraps up so much of the joy and emotion of the wedding day. The look on Lindsay’s face says everything about her new marriage that you would have to take an awkward paragraph to try to explain.

I had some fun going back through my images from the past few years and found some more that I felt like did a good job with this Show, Don’t Tell concept.

A couple things to keep in mind when you are working on Show, Don’t Tell: keep it simple; get in close; get down low. More on some of these coming soon.