Time and time again, when on assignment, I find myself photographing patterns at a much smaller scale than the entire context could be derived from. However, those visual patters are PART OF the context that I’m creating a story around. In this image above, you did the same. I believe that most photographers whose job is to participate in visual storytelling, particularly cultural storytelling, pay special attention to this aspect of the craft!

I was reminded of another aspect of our work as photographers when reading your paragraph that started with: “A picture without context is a lot like a joke where you have to explain the punchline.” I sympathize with you on both agreeing and disagreeing with this statement, and it likens to what artists would refer to as the Intentional Fallacy, a very necessary component of a viewer’s/listener’s/reader’s interpretation of a creative work. What it means to them may be something totally different than what the creator wanted to exhibit. So goes the way of our craft and the vision we use that craft to exhibit. This IS part of telling the story, the two-way, often-twisty, road of communicating between creator and viewer!

Thanks for this insightful piece, and I look forward to reading more!

I think there’s no “sin” in either way… when you have contextualized a photograph and when not.
In my personal view, I think there’s room for “personal” photography that satisfies only to your being, and “audience” photography when you have to satisfied you client, viewer, etc.

I have said in my Bio/About that I’m not pursuing to have a unique master piece, but what I want or I’m looking for is that my whole photography tells a story/theme or have meaning as a whole.

What I meant with the later, is that I’m always shooting with the thoughts/mentality of telling a story with a bunch of photographs instead of 1 or 2 frames. That’s my vision though… I love the following quote:

“t is a great honor for me to be compared to Henri Cartier-Bresson…But I believe there is a very big difference in the way we put ourselves inside the stories we photograph. He always strove for the decisive moment as being the most important. I always work for a group of pictures, to tell a story. If you ask which picture in a story I like most, it is impossible for me to tell you this. I don’t work for an individual picture. If I must select one individual picture for a client, it is very difficult for me.” – Sebastiao Salgado – Excerpts from an interview with Sebastiao Salgado by Ken Lassiter, Photographer’s Forum