Photo by Barna Kovács on Unsplash
Hi fam,
I've been talking relentlessly about narrative this week.
You've heard me talk about linear. The Western default most photographers use without ever questioning it. And circular. The story that ends where it began but transformed. Non-Western. Present in many African storytelling traditions. The story that returns with new understanding instead of resolving.
Today, I want to talk about chaos! a.k.a: fragmented narrative. The one that looks like a mess from the outside. And honestly, one of my favorites.
Sally Mann's Immediate Family doesn't follow a timeline. It moves through memory. Childhood as a psychological state, not a sequence of events. Her work feels as if the past and present were constantly collapsing into each other. An image from years ago lives next to something from this morning. The structure isn't disorder. The disorder IS the structure.
This is diasporic storytelling. Time jumps. Place shifts. Things shuffle. The present is interrupted by the past without warning.
Think of Deana Lawson. Her images don't follow a story forward. They accumulate. They circle. Fragments of Black domestic life, mythology, the sacred and the everyday all living in the same frame. We as viewers are not asked to follow the work, but rather invited to feel our way through it. To assemble it ourselves.
“Young Grandmother,” 2019. Deana Lawson, from Sikkema Jenkins & Co., New York; David Kordansky Gallery, Los Angeles
If you're working with memory, the fragmented narrative might be yours.
If you're working with trauma, the fragmented narrative might be yours.
If your identity can't be told in a straight line. If you live between two worlds, two languages, two histories. If chronology feels like a simplification of something that was never simple, the fragmented narrative might be yours.
The viewer doesn't just follow a fragmented project. They basically assemble it. And what they build from your fragments stays with them far longer than anything linear could, because they made it themselves.
The mistake I see constantly is photographers calling this kind of work “unfinished.” Editors dismissing it because it's not “in order.” Grant committees asking for a “clearer arc.” Photographers gutting the work to make it legible and losing the thing that made it true.
It's not broken. It's asking you to commit to a different kind of truth.
And this is exactly where most photographers get stuck. Not because the work is wrong, but because they don't have a methodology for holding it. For knowing what to keep, what to cut, how to sequence fragments into something that lands with intention rather than just feeling chaotic.
That methodology is what 12 weeks inside From Chaos to Clarity builds.
You leave with a finished personal project, structured and sequenced and ready to pitch. An artist statement that actually captures what your work is doing. Grant application strategy that knows how to frame non-linear work to funding bodies who default to linear thinking. And a community of 12 photographers who understand the kind of work you're making.
If you've been sitting on a fragmented project you keep calling unfinished, this is the container.
Enrollment closes March 26. Tomorrow I want to talk about the layered narrative, the palimpsest. Then it's last call.
see you next time,
Lola