A picture is worth a thousand words, or so the saying goes. Except it is not always clear from a photograph what the story behind it is. In the world of photojournalism, and even more so in documentary photography, photographers often build a story using a series of images rather than a stand alone shot.
The photograph above looks like a cute shot of lots of teddies – well, it is a shot of lots of teddies, but the story behind them is not a happy one. The teddy bears are representative of sick children in Crumlin’s Children’s Hospital, and the collection was part of a protest against cuts in the hospital resources being held outside Leinster House on this years Family Fun Day.
If I was a photojournalist, as some of those around me were when I took this shot, I would have also included in the frame some of the children on ventilators who were sitting on the pavement in front of this collection, alongside their mothers, playing with some other soft toys.
I’m not a photojournalist though, and didn’t feel comfortable taking a photograph of those children for the blog, so I chose instead to frame tightly with just the soft toys in the frame.
Much like my photograph of children’s shoes in the same spot, gathered as a mark of solidarity with victims of childhood institutional abuse, knowing the story behind this photograph adds considerably to it, and in this case you could almost say it is the words that paint the true picture.
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