Hello! : ) You mentioned in a recent post that the invention of photography changed how people told stories, and that sounded really intriguing, so I was wondering if you would please elaborate on that if you get the time?
Absolutely! In my theater history class, we looked at this in the context of theater, but it absolutely impacted all forms of storytelling.
So, before the invention of photography, there was no real way to see things that weren’t in your general vicinity. I mean, you had art, but even the most realistic forms of art at the time were subject to the interpretive lens of the artist, and anyway unless you were nobility of some sort you the most realistic art you probably saw was sensationalized newspaper illustrations or something of the like. And even if you saw, say, a tiger at a zoo, by the time you were telling your mates about it at the pub you couldn’t whip out your phone and show them what it was like. So each person who heard you talking about it would have their own image of what the tiger might look like. That’s why medieval bestiary illustrations tend to be Like That. The artists weren’t drawing from life. They were drawing from someone’s description.
How that impacts storytelling: there’s not much bother about getting the details right, because if no one in your audience has ever seen the inside of a castle none of them can contradict you. In theaters, this meant that sets were usually minimal, often no more than painted backdrops. This means that you can do whatever you want with your stories in terms of setting, because the audience is providing most of the set with their imagination. If Shakespeare wants his Midsummer Night’s Dream to transition from a castle to a forest and back again then what does it matter? The stage doesn’t even need to look any different. Maybe you pull out a tree in a pot for your characters to hide behind. If a character says it was raining fire the night before Caesar was killed, and that a lioness attacked the streets of Rome, well, no one can say that didn’t happen. As long as an actor says it, the audience can believe it. (notably, in Shakespeare’s day, it was referred to as hearing a play, rather than seeing one)
Anyway, fast forward to the invention of photography: suddenly, humans can see things that they wouldn’t normally have access to. When once you would have had to travel for months to see another continent, suddenly, you could look at a picture and know precisely what it looked like.
This is also why stuff like that fairy scam happened in the early days of photography. Images that look obviously fake to those of us who grew up knowing that their eyes could be tricked were entirely believable to people who were only just learning what the world outside their little corner looked like.
So, storytelling-wise, this meant a lot more attention to detail. (The fact that widespread literacy came along around the same time also played into this.) “Long ago, in a land far away,” was no longer enough to justify doing whatever you wanted. In theater, this especially impacted the use of sets. Audiences would have a much more solid image of what they expected say, Rome, to look like, so realistic sets became the norm. Except realistic sets take a lot of work to build and are significantly harder to change between scene. So this led to a lot of plays, like A Raisin in the Sun, that are set in the same location for the entire play. Obviously, that really impacts the kinds of stories you’re telling. Entirely new styles of acting were created to fit with this new norm, and the new frontier of acting for the film camera - acting for an audience of people seated 10+ feet away from you is very different from acting for a camera less than 3 feet away, for an audience who will see your image larger than life on a screen.
Obviously, we still have fantasy and sci-fi and all that, so the human desire to tell unrealistic stories has never really gone away, but we still expect a certain amount of internal logic from stuff like that.
But before a certain point in human history, the line between history, legend, religion, and folklore was basically nonexistent. There are a lot of factors in why things changed, but the invention of photography is definitely one of them.
