Implied Narrative

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An implied narrative gives only a moment and a few clues, leaving the viewer to build the story before and after. Victorian painters developed the ‘problem picture’: in William Quiller Orchardson's Mariage de Convenance (1883) a young wife sulks at the far end of a long dinner table from her older husband, and the viewer supplies the marriage.

Edward Hopper made the unexplained moment his signature. In Automat (1927) a woman in a hat sits alone over a cup of coffee at night, and nothing says why. Photographers stage such moments cinematically. Jeff Wall reconstructs brief incidents with actors, as in Mimic (1982), where a man makes a racist gesture as he passes an Asian man on a Vancouver pavement, and Gregory Crewdson's Beneath the Roses series (2003–08) lights small-town streets and bedrooms like film sets for events never shown. Look for glances, props and open doors.