Week 9 Text and Image

Our final ITAP lecture consists of only one single principle – the lecture itself, on the use of text and image. Knowledge of this topic is essential for visual communicators, particularly graphic designers and illustrators. Text gives images a context if they don’t have one, or a new one if they do. Consider the image below:

There is little that we can gather from this. Maybe the artist likes fields, but that’s just wild guessing. The point is, on it’s own, the image means nothing. If it were alongside other photos, we might gather a little more. If it were in a police station, we could assume that it is a crime scene. Images need some form of context to be meaningful. That’s not to say that a caption or a second image is needed, necessarily, the context can be easily integrated, but it must be there.

Something else to consider though is that context can be misleading. It is only in our minds that two things next to each other are connected – there is no logical reason for this to be the case. The fact that we associate two things next to each other is used by us subconsciously all the time. When you caption an image, you do not feel the need to tell the viewer that you are captioning that image and not just writing there, as it is accepted in our minds that the things are related. But this concept can also be exploited, and often is. Tabloids often use it to shock, putting headlines that alone are acceptable (or at least not as shocking as with a picture) next to unrelated and similarly innocuous images that together mislead the viewer and create something very provoking.

Related to this, is that even when captions are deliberately attached, they are not always truthful. The photo below I took at the student protests in London over the rising tuition fees. By changing the caption, the meaning of the image completely changes:

The bonfire party was a huge success.

Mob of youths kidnap South London woman and burn her alive during horrific
spree of gang violence.

Another artist that uses changes of context is John Hilliard, a conceptual artist who uses photography to show its uncertainty as a documentary tool. Of particular note is Cause of Death (below), which depicts the same staged murder scene framed and captioned in 4 different ways, leading the viewer to a different conclusion for each one. At the time it was made, it was revolutionary, as black and white photography was heavily associated with documentary photography, and therefore truth.

Clockwise from top left, words read: Crushed, Drowned, Burned, Fell