Scalar stories: Visuality of scales in photographic narratives

Abstract

Through comparing and contrasting the work of professional American street photographers Diane Arbus and Bruce Gilden, this article examines the use of scale in photographs, and the way it communicates the stance of the photographers toward their subjects. This article uses the notion of scale in a literal fashion as a way to look at the relationship between the objects and people in the image, the physical point of view of the photographer, and then how the optical properties of the camera lens impact this sense of relationality and proportionality within the frame. I discuss the way that visual narratives tell a story, and how they influence and take part in circulating discourses. The choices of where to take the picture from, and how to capture the subjects within the frame indexically convey attitudes and ideologies about the subject. These non-referential indexicalities of a photographic narrative influence the denotational narrative and can work to enregister aspects of various figures of personhood within the image. I show this through the work of Arbus and Gilden, who often photographed people belonging to marginal communities. I compare their photographic work alongside discussions of their ways of working and interacting with the people they photographed.