The idea of narrative or story across the arts is one I’ve found increasingly overblown. This is perhaps surprising given that my earlier creative work was in writing short and long fiction for adults and children. When it comes to these explicitly narrative forms, and that includes film and graphic fiction, I’m very much a signed-up believer in the persistence of classic myth arcs, whether it’s The Tiger Who Came to Tea or Mrs. Dalloway, the work of Junji Ito or Jacques Tati. There are situations where I’m looking for and expecting to be told a story, and when I don’t get one, or the one I get is deficient in some way, it can be infuriating. However, there are numerous artistic encounters where I’m not expecting this. It’s not always at the forefront of my mind in an exhibition, nor when watching a documentary, and it certainly isn’t at the forefront of my mind when I pick up a photobook or a zine. 

That’s not to say that narrative shouldn’t be incorporated. Mark Leckey’s 2019 retrospective exhibition O Magic Power of Bleakness blended immersive installation with theatre, folk myth and film. Documentary has long since powerfully drawn on fictional strategies to articulate complex ideas or drive home messages, from conventional works such as Morgan Spurlock’s Supersize Me to experimental ones such as Patrick Keiler’s Robinson in Ruins. John Gossage’s The Pond is perhaps my favourite photobook, and it teases the viewer as it takes them around a nondescript landscape. Jack Latham’s Sugar Paper Theories deftly takes the viewer through the labyrinthine story of a failed criminal prosecution. 

But it seems to me there’s an overemphasis on narrative across the arts – and beyond, to PR and advertising – that’s been there for some considerable time. I think this is limiting, and I can equally point to favourite works to which narrative is irrelevant: Richard Misrach’s Desert Cantos, Simone Nieweg’s Landscapes and Gardens. The images of Gregory Crewdson’s Twilight might hint at narratives, but the book, from my own responses, is arranged for affect rather than logic. 

It should be noted that in the case of Gossage and Latham, the works follow readymade narratives – a journey, a criminal case. There is a logical reason for adopting these. Of course, it could be that to the more tutored eye, narratives do emerge, to which I would argue that in such a case, they are of significantly lesser importance than those who created them or identify them might realise. 

As I’m intending on creating a zine for my work in progress portfolio, I’ve been acquiring and evaluating a number which explore space in some way. The relationship between space and narrative is complex: narratives assume beginnings, crises and endings, whereas space is without such events. Exporting human narratives onto explorations of space would be to anthropomorphise it. Additionally, to impose narrative on space is to tidy it and simplify it. Space is complex and, especially when dealing with a maximum of 16 images, to impose narrative would be reductive. And, last, it is to curate it: what I intend, as with my film work, is to give viewers the possibility of their own experience of the space being represented. 

It’s interesting just how few of the zines I’ve looked at have explicit narratives. The most overtly narrative is Nils Karlson’s Iceland, which takes the viewer from remote mountain to farmstead, town and to the ocean, also making use of the changing of seasons. In River to River, Stephen McCoy takes the viewer between the rivers Mersey and Douglas, with scant attention to continuity of light or season. But that’s it. Marc Vallee’s Down and Up in Paris is a visceral immersion in tagging that riffs on repetition and ubiquity, in keeping with its subject. Kyle McDougall constructs mini-journeys within snowbird around sites, but groups these together thematically, interspersing with diptychs chosen for their thematic or aesthetic relationships. Likewise, Alexis Maryon occasionally groups images thematically across several pages in Port of Newhaven, but there does not appear to be any narrative logic behind their arrangement, but rather a deft manipulation of affect, a progression that is more akin to music. Francesca deLuca’s extraordinary Cyan Sands begins with a logic of aesthetic repetition and variation, but eventually takes the viewer on a journey from the high desert mountains to sandscapes. I could discern no particular logic behind Nicholas J R White’s The Militarisation of Dartmoor – which at 23 images is the shortest of the zines here – but there is a sufficient degree of interest and aesthetic care for that not to matter. Grant Archer could well have used the journey up and down the rock of Gibraltar for his two-zine set Mons Calpe, but rather takes the viewer up and down at random; this confusion could be said to be reflective of the complexity and strangeness of his subject. 

So where does this leave me? Narrative is something I can draw on, is something I enjoy, but if it does not appear to match the intentions of a work, I should consider other logics of organisation for my work. These could be the logic of artefact and repetition, of theme, of aesthetics, or of affect, or a combination of these. As I turn to make sense of the odd series of images I made at the end of June and which will form my portfolio, it is these I will be considering. Not narrative.