The other week, the film La Jetée suddenly came to mind.
“This is the story of a man, marked by an image from his childhood. The violent scene that upset him, and whose meaning he was to grasp only years later, happened on the main jetty at Orly, the Paris airport, sometime before the outbreak of World War III.”
La Jetée (1962), by Chris Marker, is a short experimental film told almost entirely through still black-and-white photographs. It is about time, memory, and the human urge to grasp both past and future. A voice-over carries the story, set in post-apocalyptic Paris after a devastating Third World War. Underground survivors conduct time-travel experiments, searching for salvation in another era. The punch line is inevitable: the main character’s murder, in which past, present, and future collapse into a single moment.
What this photo-film shows is that a sequence of images alone cannot fully tell a story. Spoken words are needed.
In A Shimmer of Possibilities, Paul Graham uses sequences differently. His modest image series capture fragments of daily life in America, subtly exposing social contradictions. There is no overarching narrative. Instead, the sequencing creates story fragments—what Graham himself calls filmic haikus.
And then there is Jeff Wall. If anyone comes close to telling a story in a single image, it is him. His staged and meticulously constructed photographs often resemble stills from films, capturing a dramatic moment or a scene heavy with implication. Yet, even here, it is not a full story. Rather, the viewer is invited to interpret and imagine what lies before and after the frame. Wall compares this narrative power not to film but to poetry:
“The experience of photography is associative and simultaneous, and in that respect it resembles our experience of poetry.”
For this post, I chose a still from a film my mother shot while traveling in South Africa in 1973. It was the height of apartheid. My parents had long hesitated about joining this business trip. My father was outspokenly opposed to oppressive regimes—so how could he go to a country built on racist ideology? My mother brought her camera. She tried to capture apartheid alongside the landscapes and wildlife, but filming injustice proved difficult—it had to be done in secret.
One anecdote from that trip has always stayed with me: in their hotel, an elevator was reserved for white guests, while Black staff had their own. My mother refused to wait for the “white” elevator and stepped into the one reserved for staff. The hotel director promptly called her over and gave her a stern reprimand.
📽 La Jetée: Watch here
📷 A Shimmer of Possibilities: MoMA
📷 Jeff Wall: MoMA