Visual Language and Sequencing

Great photography is often compared to poetry or literature. These written mediums depend on a series of words stitched together in a coherent and moving manner. Similarly, a successful body of photography (be it a book, exhibition, portfolio, etc.) requires a skillful sequence of images to tell its story or create its tone. In this online program, we ask several questions. Do photographs have their own grammar? How can we create a sentence, a paragraph, a whole novel even, with images? How can we make sequences that ebb and flow and stop abruptly exactly when we need them to?

This three-hour interactive seminar explores the nuanced connections between photography and language. Through presentations from Drew, critical group discussions, and sequencing exercises, we explore approaches you can use to find the best possible sequence for your images. We learn that photographs are mutable and the way they are arranged is extremely important to giving them meaning and context. Using well-known examples such as Robert Frank’s The Americans and Larry Sultan’s and Mike Mandel’s Evidence, we learn how to use the visual themes of projects to make connections across images. And ultimately, we find that photography itself is a language that can speak volumes.