About

A photograph does not tell a story. You do. Set two pictures side by side and the mind reaches for the thread between them, a before and an after, a cause, a rhyme. The picture holds still; the meaning is in the order. This app is an attempt to help you practice editing (selecting) and sequencing (ordering) photographs in order to make meanings. Making something that is more than the sum of its parts. The idea came partly from photographic artist Sam Contis who selected pictures from Dorothea Lange’s archive to make Day Sleeper. How did she decide which pictures to choose and place in a specific order?

I’d been exploring pictures in the FSA archive for a lesson about zines. I was drawn to the work of Gordon Parks. So, here are twenty-five photographs by Parks, made in the early 1940s for a United States government project, and a table to lay them out on. There is no correct order. The pictures are from several different assignments and have never been shown together before.

Drag a print off the pile to begin. Move them by eye first, trusting what seems to follow what. Turn a print over to read where and when it was made. When you want to find out more, select a tactic card from the deck on the right, or let the table arrange itself by chance or by tone and see what happens. Then take it back into your own hands.

Once you’ve practised with Parks’ pictures, shuffling them into different sequences, noticing what happens and how the meanings shift, you should upload a set of your own pictures. Lay them out on the same table. The same gestures, the same tactics apply to them.

A small and growing anthology of remarks on editing and sequencing lives here.

Photographs by Gordon Parks, Farm Security Administration / Office of War Information, Library of Congress.

Your images

Bring your own photographs to the table. Add up to thirty-six and they go into the pile, top left, to be dealt, arranged, shuffled and sorted exactly as the Parks set is.

They stay on your device. Nothing is uploaded anywhere.