Hi fam,
There are five narrative structures in photography.
Most photographers were taught just one.
Linear: Beginning, middle, end. Time moves forward. Resolution is reached. “Progress” is made. We are going somewhere.
That structure didn't come from nowhere. It came from a specific tradition, Western, Enlightenment, the idea that history moves toward something. That stories have destinations. This is linear thinking with linear "progress" as a resolution-obsessed vision of a story.
(I was taught that whatever didn't follow that arc was "art" — too abstract, too difficult, not meant to be understood. A compliment disguised as a dismissal.)
I grew up studying and believing linear narrative was the mother of all structures. The one serious photographers used. The one that got you published, seen, respected.
But this couldn't be further from the truth.
In reality, linear narrative is one of five. And for many of us, it's the one that fits our stories the least.
And most photographers use it without ever questioning whether it actually fits what they're trying to say.
But think about how your grandmother told stories. Did she start at the beginning and move cleanly forward? Or did she circle back, returning to the same moment from different angles, arriving where she started but with new understanding?
That's circular narrative. Traditional non-western storytelling. The structure of ritual, inheritance, generational return.
Think about how trauma lives in the body. Not linearly. But in fragments. The present interrupted by the past without warning. That's fragmented narrative, the structure of displacement, diaspora, memory.
Or the layered narrative: multiple truths at once, past and present in the same frame. The palimpsest. The structure of identity that refuses to be reduced to one thing.
Or the poetic, images that don't tell a story at all. They create an atmosphere. They rhyme emotionally. Logic of feeling, not facts.
Five structures. Most photographers know one.
The one they keep defaulting to was designed for a story that isn't theirs.
This is the work we do in the first four weeks of From Chaos to Clarity — finding the structure that matches what your project is actually trying to say.
Enrollment closes March 26. Cohort starts March 27. 12 photographers.
With love, Lola