Home » How to Tell a Story in a Portrait: 6 Fashion Photographs & 6 Real Fictions

How to Tell a Story in a Portrait: 6 Fashion Photographs & 6 Real Fictions

In the world’s greatest short story, written like something Jorge Luis Borges would tell, there exists a sentence which captures the entire universe in the image of a single word. The reader, once encountering it, would see a world thereto entirely unknown open up, and, within it, she’ll finally remember what the ancients called life’s essence, what poets describe as light within light, and what a photographer once called our atomic instances. Out of all them, it’s the photographer, she’ll say later, that comes closest to explaining what she saw. Eventually, this reader would become a photographer, and the story, now taking her part, would repeat itself, for infinity.

When you sit down and stare at your favorite portrait photograph, what do you see? What do you feel? Are you sure that what you are perceiving truly existed? Most photographs are taken within a short burst of light. If we average it out, I’d say it’d be 1/100th of a second. 1/100th of a second is quicker than the quickest glance. 1/100th of a second is shorter than shortest memory. 1/100th of a second is the slightest twitches, the tiny instances that build larger worlds. When I look at portrait photograph, when I’m asked to write about them, the only help, the only context, the only voices I hear are illusionary. How could I trust that moment? What am I seeing?

I really have no answer, yet I know it’s the stories that I’m drawn to. My favorites have the pull of a dark star. Like hearing my name in the middle of the night, the ones that stay forever under my skin are ones that tell a story. Of course, stories are not present in all photographs, abstract ones never worry about providing it. And that’s fine, too. They’re like Frank Stella paintings, objects adored for their sheer visual aesthetic. But portraits, portraits like these by Yumna Al-Arashi, have a story. And in each of the next 6 photographs, I’ll going to briefly write what I see in them, write my own imagined truths. Hopefully, you’ll find my thread and sever it — continue the story with your own photographs. All I want is the word that pulls everything together.

Enjoy portrait photograph!

There are always two people in a portrait of one. One in the body, one the shadow. Sometimes, in dreams, we realize the holiest truths; sometimes, in dreams, we realize the ugliest myths. If I were to speak to you, in your dreams, how would I sound? What form would I take? What news would I bring?

This is intimate, a vision we’ve always known, one we’ve carried forever. It’s broken, it’s beyond us. The quiet desperation that never heals. Someone was once there. Someone has just left. Imagine her earlier that night, when getting ready alone in her bathroom. In your mind, was she smiling or was she looking at the mirror already knowing what was going to happen?

A genius as cold as steel, it’s the edge of black and white. It’s love. It’s desire. It’s youth. A stare so vast, so imperturbable, so sudden. She already knows you. She sees you. More than you. Sees all of you. Her veins boil with what she needs from you.

Some images were never meant to stay with you. Some were meant to be forgotten. Her beauty, her strength, the impossible way she understood everything in you. Those were her powers. And before all was created, there was power. Power contending with power. Now you’ve lost her. Some images were never meant to stay.

As if from another time, the seemingly matched colors and fabric, the tattoo barely there. She holds the opposite of her heart, relaxed but thinking. She’ll tell someone — much later — that it was in her favorite days that she met two lovers at the same time. She had to decide. She couldn’t.