Telling The Story

When you’re in the middle of a war zone or environmental disaster or even a sporting event – it is your job as a photographer to tell the story.

General Nguyen Ngoc Loan executing a Viet Cong prisoner in Saigon. (Eddie Adams - 1968 Associated Press)

It is not an easy job, or for the light hearted.
This often means publishing a series of images to narrate a story, enlarging them to emphasize the meaning behind the picture and even the way the photo is taken adds a perspective that the reader can relate to.
In addition to making a picture, you must caption it. This is the definitive way you can get your message to the reader.
While a caption is needed to fully understand what is taking place in an image – sometimes, a series of images can explain the event that you captured.
Nothing fits this example as well as Eddie Adams’ “Street Execution,” taken in Saigon in 1968. This was at the height of the Vietnam War, and American were being exposed, for the first time, to timely war images on the evening news.
The original caption that Adams wrote in 1968 for The Associated Press said, “General Nguyen Ngoc Loan executing a Viet Cong prisoner in Saigon.”
Later, he told TIME Magazine, “The general killed the Viet Cong; I killed the general with my camera. Still photographs are the most powerful weapon in the world. People believe them; but photographs do lie, even without manipulation. They are only half-truths. ... What the photograph didn't say was, 'What would you do if you were the general at that time and place on that hot day, and you caught the so-called bad guy after he blew away one, two or three American people?”
Adams struggled with this photograph for the rest of his life – eventually apologizing to General Nguyen Ngoc Loan and his family for the damages he caused with his photograph.
This picture won the Pulitzer Prize in 1969 for spot news photography.
Here is how a series of images can better tell this story.

A series of images can better tell a story of exactly what happened. (Eddie Adams - 1968 Associated Press)

Adams’ series of photographs better narrates the story. While the emphasis is on the prisoner, Adams’ makes sure to frame his photograph to tell the entire story.
While there are endless aspects to fine-art photography, Adams’ job was to tell stories, and that is exactly what he did. Through the series of photographs and captions, you, the reader, can tell exactly what is going on in the streets of Saigon in 1968.