On Defining Visual Narratives

Visual story-telling is a phenomenon that every society is acquainted with. The term extensively used to refer to visual story-telling in recent times is ‘Visual Narrative’. The label ‘Visual Narrative’ is applied in a generic sense to denote anything from an illustrated story-book to motion pictures. Far from being a trivial term, ‘Visual Narrative’ is in reality an all encompassing idiom, it is a sub genre of Visual Studies itself. With the advancement of scholarly inquiry in the area of visual and narrative studies, there is a pressing need to establish Visual Narratives (VN) as a distinctive area of study so as to open up sub genres to critical examination. It is our endeavour to present a definition of Visual Narrative and in particular to lobby for the establishment of ‘Static Visual Narrative (SVN)’, ‘Dynamic Visual Narrative (DVN)’and ‘Interactive Visual Narrative (IVN) as sub genres of Visual Narratives. Introduction Visual Narrative (henceforth—‘VN’) is a term taken for granted to mean (quite rightly) -a combination of the two words ‘Visual’ and ‘Narrative’. If one tries looking up the definition of the term ‘Visual Narrative’, chances are that one may not find it; and yet VN is a topic under 1 Although the definition of ‘Visual Narrative’ is not explicitly spelled out; Julia Murray mentions a working definition of ‘narrative illustration’ as: the pictorial representation of or reference to one or more “events” that occur in a sequence of time and that bring about a change in the condition of at least one character (Murray, 1995:17). As we accept the term ‘narrative illustration’ as a synonym of ‘Static Visual Narrative’ we employ the point mentioned by Murray as one of the characteristics of which intensive research has been happening over the past decades. One may not have heard of a specialized field or department called VN but one most certainly must be acquainted with terms such as -Narrative Art, Visual storytelling, Films, Pictorial stories, Illustrated stories, Comics, Sequential art, History Painting, Animation etc. What binds the above mentioned areas is the fact that they are all essentially explorations into visuals that tell stories. It is our aim in this paper to demonstrate that individual research areas (such as the ones mentioned above) that conduct independent research are in fact various forms of VNs. We thus propose the establishment of VN as a distinct category of Visual and Narrative Studies. Furthermore, we discuss three types of VNs -‘Static Visual Narrative’, ‘Dynamic Visual Narrative’, and ‘Interactive Visual Narrative (henceforth—SVN, DVN and IVN) as sub genres of VNs. As part of this paper we also undertake to define VN and its sub categories discussing each with the help of examples. It is our belief that doing this would not only unify the various areas under a single domain but also encourage sharing of knowledge between the sub fields. Moreover, a categorization of this type would open up new areas of research to students and professionals dealing with VNs. the VN. We refrain from using the words ‘narrative illustration’ or ‘pictorial storytelling’ (words synonymously used by Murray) in favor of the much more flexible term -‘Static Visual Narrative’; the justification for which shall be provided further on in the paper. On Defining Visual Narratives