Narratives in photography

hi!

So i’ve just began a photography class at uni and we were asked to read the into to ‘The Photographers Eye’ by John Szarkowski and the element on ‘The Detail’ confused me a bit as it mentioned how photographs cannot tellnarratives, and instead they show a small portion of a narrative (symbols) and i’m a little confused about what this means??

I feel like in photography there is a goal to tell a story/ narrative, no?

I feel that’s especially present in more constructed imagery with intentional meaning.

I understand this phrase is more geared towards photography in the moment out in the world in real life and might be meaning like.. you can’t get the full story though a single image but i was wondering if anyone else had any concrete ideas about this and photography “telling a narrative” as a whole?

I asked my teacher and she just said “photographs do tell stories” and kind of left it at that so i’m a bit confused what i was meant to understand from the text then??