The stories beyond the pictures
Victoria Ward, Thursday, November 05, 2009

I’ve noticed the word ‘beyond’ coming up a lot in connection with our story work recently and noticing the distinction between stories that take you beyond and stories that take you behind.

The Wellcome Institute has an image award called ‘The stories beyond the images’, whose storytelling is layered:

• the image takes you into a story
• the story takes you into a place in science you might not otherwise visit
• the intentions, techniques and ambitions behind the images take you into the worlds of light microscopy, electron microscopy, confocal and multiphoton microscopy, high-resolution episcopic microscopy.

Obscurely, I was drawn into the world of microscopy by the gorgeous Darwin exhibition at the Fitzwilliam Museum in Cambridge over the summer, where I noticed the ‘British Microscopical Society’, one of those passionately enquiries societies that characterised the thirst for knowledge in the 19th century.

As a detour into matters of science and story, I’ve noticed recently a trend to wondering whether science fiction is now becoming increasingly irrelevant as science fact is so much beyond the horizons and experiences of most punters, and so the story IS the science.

Science takes me to the next place too. There was a very moving and excellent article in the Guardian Weekend by Clive Stafford Smith, about a German doctor who has, for 30 years, collected X rays of torture victims. Professor Hermann Vogel, the collector, says:

Photographs of torture victims are often so brutal and blatant that the viewer looks away. It’s a reflex. Anonymous x-ray images can be viewed more objectively. The images make the viewer think about the issue of torture, but in a bearable way. That is my aim.

This is an interesting area of storytelling, certainly in the context of organisations that we often work with – development agencies and Banks, who I think struggle both with the issue of how to make the story bearable, and how to avoid what someone recently called ‘the blah blah factor’. Yeah, yeah, we fund mobile telephone and micro credit projects and women are empowered to start their own businesses. It’s all great. But where’s the story? So at one end of the spectrum, how to create enough cool distance that the shock does not perturb people so much that they cannot face the story, and at the other, to create enough intimacy and surprise that distant stories can be brought closer and have personal resonance and meaning. (“Hard Candy”, a film I watched recently, would be a very interesting example of the first category here.)

I’ll end on a more whimsical note, about the stories beyond the pictures. There’s a great article by Bruno Latour in some book years back and I’m too lazy to go and get the reference. I short, he talks about the knowledge claim, the relationship between person and object which leads to a sequence, and how one cannot, in advance, know what the important moments are going to be. In the same article he also talks about how instructions can be embedded in an object, or stand apart from them. A hotel can tell you to give your key back and you might or might not remember; they can put up a notice of instructions, which sounds rather intrusive; they can give you a key with a very heavy keyring attachment, which makes it too unwieldy for you to carry about, so the prompt is embedded in the object; or, of course, today, they just give you disposable keys. Anyway, I thought of that when going round the Sloane Museum at half term, and being entertained by the way the Sloane presented its instructions not to sit on the furniture. A story beyond the object, indeed.