Week Nine - Image and Text

This week the principle that I would be looking into is how text can change meanings and how our image can be greatly influential on our emotions.

Sometimes when we look at a photograph, the first perception that we get could be something entirely different to what we thing about the picture after some text is added under it. An image is worth a thousand words, yet we a rarely find images without text. We use word to describe images just as we use images to tell a story. The photographer whose reference I am using is Steve McCurry. One particular picture that he did was of a boy, holding a gun to his head and crying. It was called Young Boy, Peru (2004).

When I first look at the picture I felt shocked to see such a young boy with a gun in his hand. Seeing his clothes I felt sorry for him as he was obviously from a poor part of the country and the circumstance that he might have to live in to be pushed to such extremes. However when you read the description, the shock element is at least removed as it is a toy gun. McCurry says that the he was a boy from a mountainous village area in Peru and the reason he was crying was because the children he was playing with were tormenting him. I was glad to know that at least the gun was not real. However I still wonder over the social implications it must have on people who are looking at it for the first time without the background story.

In the same way images have a great influence on our emotions. There is one image by Keith Arnett that I feel is really beautiful. It is a photograph of a doll floating in water. When I first say it, I was struck by it as it looked like a picture of the baby in the mother’s womb. I felt it was really awe-inspiring and for me it meant a lot of things. It felt like security to be near your mother again, be close to her, almost inside her, like the baby. Being away from home, it filled me up and I could not help crying a bit but not because I was upset, but it was a very touching picture for me.

Image with and without text holds a very strong relationship to evoke emotion. Sometimes a very serious image could be made humorous by some funny text, changing its concept, and sometimes image does not need words to describe it but it is there for you to feel as you want to, not what it actually means.