Silence and photographic narration

Abstract

This article is an essay whose object of study is silence in photographic narration. For this purpose, I have reviewed texts in which it is discussed, but given their scarcity, I have had to rely on others that deal with image. I begin by characterizing silence as an element of photography and distinguish between silencing, silenced [event] / silenced [image] and silence. The latter may appear as photographs that demand silence from us, photographs capable of radiating stillness and calm and that we assimilate in silence, photographs that use metaphors to represent silence and, finally, photographs that incorporate silences. I emphasize that silence is capable of meaning and that its meaning occurs in contextualization and use. A silence that can inform and not only be an expressive element. To develop these ideas, I analyse various photographs and look at their possible silences, which, insofar as they are interrelated with other elements of the image, form a unit: the photograph itself. For this analysis and due to the absence of texts that specifically focus on this object of study, I use classical Chinese painting by analogy. The text should be read as an approach to an object of study that to this day has received little attention.