There is an odd dichotomy going on here. Try and find examples of photographed comic strips and, excepting the odd flourish of ideas here and there, you are limited to dreary and repetitive love-angst in teenage magazines. Yet is there a creative endeavor more pervasive than photographic narrative? Think about it. Is there anyone in the Western world (and a goodly part of the Eastern world) who does not make photographs and then use them to tell stories: holidays, celebrations or private moments collected into sequence — time cut up with a narrated voice track added? This is the most ancient form of creative communication (storytelling) in its most current form, so why is it not represented across the board at all cultural levels?
This is a question I have been playing with for some time. My background is in illustrations, design and comics (or 'graphic novels' as they are now rather sniffily referred to). Comics have developed, or should I say continued monotonously, in a bubble. Produced by fans for fans, they have evolved their own mutative peculiarities of form and content. Form rarely strays from the traditional pencil/inked cartoons that have serviced them for many years. These iconic caricatures of people and situations have been commented on by the art world and popular culture many times in the past, and do not need revisiting here, but the key reason why comic strips have not explored photography to any great degree lies in the undeniable power that the 'everyman' cartoon face enjoys. Anyone can identify with these cypher-people because they lack any specific or subtle features that photographs cannot help but record. A photograph can only be one person; a circle with two dots and a dash is 'society.'
Those that have tried using the photograph as a source of information from which to make drawings for comic strips, myself included, have found the stiffness and lack of 'emotional' information as opposed to literal information — of which there is always an abundance — difficult to deal with, especially in a medium where movement within the panel and an easy flow between panels are of primary importance. Many artists, from Paul Strand to Milton Glaser, have stated how lifeless drawings from photographs appear to be, and it is not hard to see why.
Despite this general lack of interest in photography, for some it is a short step from reviewing the holiday snaps with accompanying banter to the photo-strips. Posed actors with exaggerated expressions and word balloons containing the usual verbal fluff. There is the odd gem: Mad magazine and its contemporaries experimented to a degree with this form, but with little success on a formal level. They never progressed beyond this basic recipe; the dialogue has a degree of wit, the poses have a pinch of ironic self-mockery about them, but they are most notable perhaps for including some of Terry Gilliam's first professional work in Harvey Kurtzmann's Help magazine (including photo-strips using struggling actor John Cleese).
Having largely rejected the literal associations of 'storytelling,' the art world, in an understandable effort to get away from that question 'What is it?', has had little time for photo narrative, or even narrative painting. Obviously some notable exceptions spring to mind. Duane Michals, a consummate storyteller, combines gentle, resonant sequences of images with elliptical handwritten commentary in the margins; his voice wavers between the photographs, coaxing layers of interpretation from such simple raw materials. David Hockney's experiments with multiple photographs or 'joiners' show the artist fighting with a medium that is so much about 'the moment,' trying to extend that moment to give his photographic work the same degree of time and rigorous 'looking' that his paintings possess. Hockney's and Sol LeWitt's gridded works — many photographs placed next to each other describing a place, a scan of the room, a feeling, a short space of time passing — function very much like a comic strip, the viewer's eye reading from top left to bottom right, but then free to wander around the images, making any number of other connections between them.
This idea of the wandering eye is important in searching for definitions of comics. Images laid out in a specific sequence, to be read and absorbed in a specific order, are a generally accepted feature of a comic strip, yet these collections of images — LeWitt's windows, Hockney's TV screens, Andy Goldsworthy's recordings of his own location work — point towards a far broader and more open way of looking at narrative work. The storytelling is going on in the borders between images, in what is characteristically and self-deprecatingly referred by comic artists as the 'gutter.' In my book Signal to Noise (1992) with writer Neil Gaiman, some of the scenes were approached this way. Since the book was as much about 'noise' (the meaningless, the trivial, the arbitrary) as it was about 'signal,' I used 'sign' panels, images triggered by the text, arranged in 16 panel grids, there to be read in a traditional manner, but allowing for associations to be made out of sequence. The reactions we have generated from our readers seem to indicate a far greater willingness to deal with quite complex abstraction in this rather seductive narrative form than with more traditional single images, artworks or installations. As an image-maker working in a 'populist' medium such as comics, I am obviously happy to continue to experiment with my audience's expectations of said form.
In this spirit then, perhaps a look at the points at which storytelling and photography cross would be useful. First, the taking of the photograph: the fragment of time that is captured is unflinching in its total recall of all the surface details that are within the frame, important or not. Sequences of photographs can reveal the slightest changes of light on a wall, the natural decay of an apple, the patterns of light on water, the smallest changes of expression that can say so much. In short, a world of small constant 'nows,' as subjects that in life flicker and fade are recorded for us to peruse at our leisure — an unseen world. And then there is the photographer as subject: the wandering eye again, but this time through the camera lens; the photographer imposing a gridded structure of time on the surrounding chaos, perhaps taking photographs in a sequence exactly ten minutes apart, regardless of what is happening in front of the camera, abdicating creative control to a system — the visual equivalent of the chance music of John Cage and Steve Reich. Or the photographer as editor, showing details that may add up to a greater experience of the subject than a single shot, recording a journey or event in real-time.
This is an idea I have been very involved with recently: real-time comics. So much of the problem with making experimental imagery for comics is found in the huge and irreconciliable gulf between the excessive time taken to make the image compared with the realistic amount of time the reader is supposed to spend with it before moving on. The camera creates images in an instant; they are lifeless to a degree, but that distance the lens puts between the photographer and the reader is also full of associations and meaning. In Jon J Muth's adaptation of Fritz Lang's film M in comic form, he decided to use this distance to try and tell this explosive, emotive story as objectively and dispassionately as possible, allowing the reader to make up his or her own mind about the morals of the story and, by extension, the morals of the medium and the morals of the artist's eye behind the camera. The final artwork was created in graphite, silverpoint and paint, but the images were copied exactly from staged photographs, therefore allowing another layer of irony, the artist's hand only just in evidence underneath the accumulated associations of the photographic source material.
And then there are the stories we tell simply by moving about. The tracery lines of our motion through space recorded with slow shutter speeds. If the job of the writer is to 'write it new,' then the camera's ability to 'see it new' counterpoints that perfectly.
Then there is the print process. While there are many ways of manipulating images in the darkroom, finding specific storytelling uses for these is difficult. One story I have worked on for an unpublished collection of experimental comics called 'Pictures That Tick' starts with a heavily manipulated and wrapped sheet of photographic paper. As the narration continues, the layers of media — paint, paper, tape, soil — are scraped away, eventually revealing the surface of the paper; then the toning, scratches, staining and scoring disappear to reveal a portrait of a young woman, the narrator whose life-story we have been reading. Her image fades on the paper and eventually the paper is replaced, unused, into the light-shield black bag. Obviously we have been watching time running backwards, and reading a life running forwards.
Finally we come to the image itself. What expectations do we have of the image? That it tells us the truth? This trust is even easier to betray with sequences of photographs. As a culture, we love to make sense out of the things around us. We need to make patterns, to extract the signal from the noise. Place a series of photographs in sequence and there is a tacit agreement between artist and viewer that this sequence runs in a continuous time line. This is the deceit that all film editors and directors play with to create fiction aond documentary that manipulates our emotions and feelings so thoroughly. This is the most convincing use of photography I have found in comics. In Charles Burns' photo story 'The Cat Woman Returns,' pitched at Art Spiegelman's Raw magazine but eventually published in Steven Bissette's Taboo, Burns plays with the relationship of the photograph and reality, and the pulp fiction story and fact. A central theme of my own book Mr Punch (1994, again with Neil Gaiman) is the gap between a child's memory and those same events seen through adult eyes, with all the knowledge and perceptions that come with that adult view. The Punch and Judy story that is the spine of the book is a perfect analogy for this: to children it is bright, silly puppets jumping about, shouting in squeaky voices, crocodiles, sausages and fun; to an adult it is a horrific, relentless serial killer nightmare, 'family values' gone mad. I wanted to exaggerate this world of truth and lies, by playing with people's expectations of photographs versus drawn imagery. All the 'real' events, the day-to-day anecdotes, are drawn using figures that look vaguely puppet-like. All the dreams, and nightmares, and puppet-show memories are photographed. Exactly which parts of the story are reliable or not become difficult to determine, and that elusive Chinese-whisper quality that memories possess is created.
If xerography has a place here, then I should mention the colour photocopier as a wonderful tool for telling stories, having time built into the process of image-making with its cyan-magenta-yellow-black scans. Moving the source image, allocating colours to emphasize the emotional differences of different parts of the image by covering or removing objects while the scanning process is in operation, recopying an image many times so that is degrades in quality and starts to take on qualities of its own; all these seem to me to be legitimate ways of using xerography to make new statements in comics.
And, finally, what is on the horizon? Cameras that digitize the image straight into a computer ready for manipulation. Interactive media implying an environment where the artist supplies the raw materials out of which the audience creates its own stories. An infinite amount of possibilities. A piece of work that can be a physically different experience from person to person. These are all crudely available now, but how will these new media affect an already diffuse culture? Storytelling entertains certainly, but it is as a way of communicating information, imagination and culture that it is at its most powerful.