Here I Am, Telling You My Story: Faces, Imagination and Storytelling in People We Love

The following short essay was written by Professor Jenna Ng, University of York, for the catalogue that accompanied the edition of People We Love in Viborg, Denmark, in the Autumn of 2023. It is reproduced here with gratitude.

How are stories told? My own memory floods with my grandmother’s voice at bedtime, spinning aural gossamers in my tired mind as my eyelids drooped. Stories are also told through centuries of songs, poems, plays, paintings, tapestries. Gossip from neighbours and by the office water cooler. Through scrawls on diaries; crisp black and white letters of printed books; shapes and colours of comics and graphic novels; the crackle of radio broadcasts. Through audiovisual re-creations in movies and TV; and zany videos streamed from YouTube and TikTok. Through the totalizing environments of VR headsets, neck aching from all the head twisting. The illuminance of screens as we read online blogs and fan fiction, and play out stories on videogames. The ways of storytelling are with image and colour. But, above all, with sound and language – spoken, printed, recorded, played back, heard.

People We Love debunks all that. Its silence is deafening. The viewer draws towards one of five screens, invited by a spotlight. There is no sound, no narration, no music, no voices. Its images are stark. Just a series of strangers’ faces onscreen, looking straight ahead.

Faces. The French philosopher Roland Barthes famously wrote of the face (specifically Greta Garbo’s in the film Queen Christina) as carrying a Platonic essence – perfect, conceptual, singular; “intellectual even more than formal”. Comparing Garbo to Audrey Hepburn, Barthes remarks on the transition of the cinema face “from awe to charm”; not of essence, but of the existential. From clarity to lyricism.

The face, then, as that unique vehicle of storytelling in People We Love. Against a plain black background, each face holds relatively still; each face conveys its essence: Here I Am. Yet these faces also show life, memories, vitality, soul. Eyes blink. Sometimes they tear. The subtle movements of facial muscles fidgeting, restless, then settling again. The corners of the mouth that twitch, or turn slightly upwards, or sometimes just shiver with the ghosts of recollection. These faces say: Here I Am… and Here I Am, Telling You My Story.

Or, rather, half of the story. The rest is completed only when the viewer – live, real, in three-dimensions – steps up to the screen. The two faces now confront each other, suddenly connecting across anachronous worlds forged over a physically correct eyeline and their single common context of understanding: one is looking at someone they love; the other is looking at them looking at someone they love.

In that collision, the story is created. Wordless, unspoken. But told. Prised by the viewer from the stranger’s face; mined between Platonic essence and existential being. This is storytelling at possibly its most abstract: it is difficult to consider how it may be stripped down any further. This is also storytelling at its most democratic. There is no top down grand narrative, no fiercely protected canon, no “official” text. This is a story that is shared with utmost sincerity: the face onscreen accepts their story needs to be received on the viewer’s terms; the viewer acknowledges that they must do the work to get the result.

But that sincerity is what makes People We Love so magical. It is not simply an entirely original form of story and storytelling, although those endeavours are undoubtedly part of the project. It is about that different way of communicating about our lives, which is what stories are ultimately all about. That different way of reaching out to another. That different way of being human together. That different way of understanding what understanding can be.

Jenna Ng
Professor in Film and Interactive Media
University of York