A Picture is Worth a Thousand Words...and Vice Versa A panel discussing the intersection of words and images “When words become unclear, I shall focus with photographs. When images become inadequate, I shall be content with silence.” (Ansel Adams) Summary of Lit Fest Seminar below "We learn about words and pictures as children when our parents read our first books to us. From there pictures and words become more and more disconnected and uninterpretable. Today, in our electronic world we are flooded with images without narrative or context. Are images overwhelming words? The old paradigm is literacy of words; the new paradigm is the literacy of images. Words are written images; images are visual words. Images have a visual vocabulary. Words are the voice of images…a way of communicating a narrative that may or may not belie the true context of the image. Is the narrative of images driven by point of view? How do we as writers (and photographers) help images communicate?" Today f8 hosted a panel previewing their seminar at Lit Fest next month. All three panelists first talked about their own involvement with words in their own photography...Brian and his book "Power of One", Debe with her embedded words in her photography and Bill with his prose poems associated with some of his work. The discussion and f8 comments were, as usual difficult to document...unless you were there. Below is some flavor of what we hit upon...knowing full well we were just touching issues more often than not. Debe talked about images projecting feelings first even before the narrative is written Billtalked about pictures you "can't turn away from" even if the narrative is not assigned eg Napalm Girl or Falling Man Brian talked his pictures being associated with a narrative giving social meaning to his subjects We all discussed ... John Berger's "Ways of Seeing" (1972) 'But there is also another sense in which seeing comes before words. It is seeing which establishes our place in the surrounding world; we explain that world with words, but words can never undo the fact that we are surrounded by it. The relation between what we see and what we know is never settled." Tom Wolfe's "The Painted Word (2008)...mentioned, not discussed words and images as truth and metaphor how words give voice to images photojournalism...and the issue of truth and visual bias strength of images with essays (photo essays) and social consciousness juxtaposition of words and pictures in childrens books and the disconnect in media the elephants in the room...internet and social media...disconnecting images and word advertising images ...as symbols without words...semiotics words bring to mind images and train our imagination what if the ancient cave drawings had narrative...or if the Bible was populated with photos of the time images and words together communicate the need for more collaboration with photographers and writers We did not have time to discuss... graphic novels poetry and images photographers as writers...writers as image makers the ways that technology distributes images without narrative new Lucas Museum of Narrative Art here in LA ...and many more issues on this topic The panel was grateful for the f8 input Below are some references and links
Photography & Literature (Exposures) Francois Brunet Reaktion Books Ltd / London / 2009 (available through Amazon Books) Photography and Literature in the Twentieth Century David Cunningham, Andrew Fisher, Sas Mays Cambridge Scholars Publishing / 2008 (available through Amazon Books) On Writing with Photography Karen Beckman, Lilane Weisberg (Editors) University of Minnesota Press / 2013 (available through Amazon Books) “Lit” / Aperture #217 / Winter 2014 Whole issue devoted to the narrative of photography (available through Amazon Books) Telling Tales: Contemporary Narrative Photography Multiple Contributers McNay Museum Publishers / 2016 (available through Amazon Books) Links of Interest Lucas Museum of Narrative Art http://lucasmuseum.org
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