I attribute the success of this photo to the staying power of Hollywood’s 1930s and 40s Film Noir. Noir featured atmospheric crime-laden drama with a heavy emphasis on sexual tension: fog, darkness, betrayal, loneliness, fear. All these emotions are easy to feel in Lucia’s photograph thanks to film noir.
A Photograph Sets the Mood
Use a photograph to set the stage for your story. There isn’t much you need to do to heighten the mood of your story if you illustrate it with this photo. Whether you are telling the story of real criminal treachery, or simply using the noir trope to lend drama to your story, let a photo do the heavy lifting. You can captivate your audience without telling a complex backstory, or retrying a guilty verdict.
Many stories used in a presentation have big emotional content. Whether the story makes your audience laugh or cry doesn’t really matter. What matters is that emotional stories help your audience feel the message. It is emotion rather than fact that will connect your audience with your message. It is the emotion you created that they will remember long after they’ve forgotten the details.
The Photographer Tells Her Story
My story begins with on a foggy morning. On my way down to the waterfront, I envisioned moody photos with a film noir look. If it had been in my old days of photography, I would have loaded my camera with black and white film. But I knew that the fog would obscure most of the color from the scene. When I arrived at the waterfront, I was thrilled to find the sun just beginning to break through the fog. This was fortuitous timing, because the sunlight reflecting off of the windows added depth to this mysterious scene. Of course afterwards, I created a black and white photo to achieve my vision of a moody, film noir effect.
