Introduction/Initial Thoughts

Narrative: 

A spoken or written account of connected events; a story: "a bare narrative of the details".

Photographic Narrative is by name the telling of a story, or an account of one or more events in the form of a single or a series of photographs.

To narrate, in it's simplest form, is to provide an account of a single or series of interlinked events. The most traditional form of narrative can be found within novels or stories. Here narrative is [in my opinion at least] at it's purest. In a story, the narrator (in other words: the writer) is free to expand upon or omit details as he or she chooses. While there is of course a certain degree of interpretation, the implied moral or plot is almost always obvious.

To convey a story through a photograph seems [on first impression] to be an entirely different beast. While the narrator of a story has a limitless combination of words available to them, the photographer has only a limited amount of images at his/her disposal, therefore each image must be constructed with great care. As a result of this, the potential narrative behind a photograph is as much a result of audience interpretation as anything else. The photographer could choose to include a description along with their photographs, however it seems to me that this would reduce the artistic value of the piece. The inclusion of a title only would seem to be a more appropriate way of providing the audience with a clue as to the artist's intent.