ITAP; week 9, No Principles - Image and Text

Generalisation of lecture Image and Text

As visual communicators, we often don’t find it appropriate to accommodate text to accompany an image, as they say a photograph says a thousand words, however this is not always the case. As it has been proven from the lecture that has been demonstrated, many images appear either naked and deprived because of the lack of description, also they are hard to understand what the purpose and meaning are, or have been know to cause offence to the audience because of the absence of text not justifying the context and purpose of the imagery.
   Not all images need to be accompanied by text to clearly demonstrate the purpose, meaning or context, such as landscape photography, which may be to create or demonstrate atmosphere, apposed to depicting an emotional state of mind, recollect on memories or be used for reportage purposes. Also, images that are absent of text, it could be to potentially allow the audience to extract their own opinions on the meaning, purpose and context, or to merely allow the audience to connect to the image in a more personal manner without direction from the sub text.
   The use of text within an image could be used as the dominant feature to add emphasis and communicate the idea of the piece, creating a bold statement and showing the importance of the message. Also the use of text can dramatise the imagery, and bring a certain retrospect of subconscious reality to a more conscious state.
   On the other hand, Reportage photography is often accompanied with text to describe and depict the photograph. Despite the accompaniment of words to tag line the photograph which can be seen as a truthful representation of events, this is not always the case, due to the ability to be able to frame pieces, formulating a whole new meaning and context for the imagery, creating more detachment from the truth.

 

Useful and valuable information gained from the lecture:

   To summarise, by ad dinging imagery to a scenario alone it leaves an open span of meaning available and can be potentially perceived in the wrong mannerism. However, by using text it can recontextulised the image to display the meaning that the artist had originally intended, creating the addition of a poetic justice to the piece.

The photographs above are some images I have selected from Richard Averdon’s collection “Drifters”, this collection was based around the homeless community which lived within America. However the series of images were left untitled, and the subjects of the photographs left unidentified. After consumers felt that this work was patronising and disrespectful to the people who were photographed within the book, Averdon then worked along side Lara Wilson, beginning to collect the stories, the details, and the identities of these people, so that the consumers would not feel as though it is an exploitation, but more of a discovery.

Gillian Wearing produced this series of images to criticise the idea and pre-misconception that human emotion can be clearly depicted from facial expressions, and also from the body language. By challenging the idea of this theory, she began to ask a diverse variety of subjects to write down their thoughts and feeling upon a piece of card to express them selves, apposed to being critically analysed by their facial expression.

   This case study shows the lack of relation to an emotion and an expression, so text accompanying the imagery in this instance works in an effective way due to it causing a contrast, proving that photography is not always factual.