Suresh Naganathan
- Nov 6, 2023
- 2 min read

Fiction

A few years into my love affair with photography, I grew frustrated with the "tyranny of the single image". Not only are they rare to come by, but I also felt constrained by their limitations to tell us complex stories.

I feel that even the most ambiguous single image will only have a handful of interpretations and once you have identified them, the image's life is "over". I wanted to say more with my pictures.

Although my photographs are extracted from the real world and describe a place and a time, I always desired to decontextualize them and give them more than one life.

One of the things that has fascinated me the most with photobooks is the fact that the same image can tell me a different story depending on the theme of the book, its position in the overall sequence, or the image next to it. Sohrab Hura's book "The Coast" was an eye-opener to me in that respect. By juxtaposing the same image with a different one, the pairs took a completely different meaning. It's a masterpiece in storytelling.

After I discovered this book, I became obsessed with storytelling. I wanted my images to say more. Having them stand on their own was just one of their avatar. I also hoped for them to become the building blocks, the vocabulary of larger stories. I longed to create my own fiction but only with images.

I think that we could all benefit from looking at our images not just as a one-off hit but as mini-phoenixes that we can keep resurrecting. A (street) photograph that's supposed to depict reality is usually a lie: we decide what to include and exclude to tell our version of the events that unfolded. But why should we limit ourselves to just one lie? A photograph can have a thousand and one lives and tell us a thousand and one lies or stories. We just have to let them expand beyond the original context in which they were shot. To me, this exercise in storytelling has been freeing. It's been a creative outlet at a time when I couldn't shoot as often as I would have liked to.

In this blog post, I want to share a few of these stories. Although I aimed to contain these tales within just 4 images, they are also part of larger narratives that I will keep adding to over the next years. I hope you enjoy these little "movies" made with stills.