A WORD OR TWO ABOUT PICTURES
by Allan R. Andrews
American Reporter Correspondent

Don't get me wrong. I'm a fan of photography. In fact, I own several cameras. I've done a good share of making my first 10,000 images, which is expected of photojournalists before they will be signed by the major photo agencies. Forget for the moment that 90 percent of my images are of my four children.

I was once a card-carrying member of the National Press Photographers Assn., largely because at the time part of my work was as a photo editor. I know the power of photographs.

Photos can bring a story to vivid life. We read story after story about Tiananmen Square, but one frame of a lone person standing before a column of tanks captured symbolically the ideal that was championed there.

The meaninglessness and horror of the Vietnam War was probably captured best in Eddie Adams' candid shot of a summary execution carried out with a pistol on a street in Vietnam. That shot symbolized all that is wrong with war.

Joe Rosenthal, one of several great Associated Press war photographers, provided a powerful symbol of victory in the Pacific when he shot -- and re-shot -- the raising of the flag on Mount Suribachi on Iwo Jima. His photo has been transformed into a national memorial statue just across the Potomac River from Washington.

I dare say, however, that without the foundation of words these symbols lose their powerful context.

These are good pictures every one, to be sure, but they become almost content-less images without the words that set them up and give them immortality.

The real problem with photo images, however, was most succinctly stated by Edward R. Murrow, the great CBS newscaster who did some remarkable communicating with words before he became a pioneering television newsman.

News, Murrow said, is what goes on in people's heads, and it's impossible to take pictures of that.

The hard part, of course, is that our words themselves are attempts to put into "pictures" what is going on in the world of ideas.

As French philosopher Maurice Merleau-Ponty once claimed, when one is dealing with words, one is always dealing with an abstraction from reality.

Put simply, no matter how we may try, we cannot eat the word F-I-S-H. An image undoubtedly comes to mind, but it remains an abstraction. No one can put reality into words.

One could eat the newsprint on which the word F-I-S-H is printed, but the experience would be quite different than the experience of tasting salmon or cod or swordfish. It takes an artist to put words on paper that will make one's mouth water.

Similarly, photographs are abstractions. The image captured in a 50mm, 75mm, or 200mm lens is not the reality. Photos, like words, are always a two-dimensional abstraction from reality.

In our struggle to communicate, however, words have great advantages over photographs.

Words can take us above, below, around and inside the instant that a photograph freezes.

Words can take one back or forward in time to tell what an event means, how it is interpreted, how it is to be recorded in the mind of humanity. Pictures do none of this.

Words can give one the history of a moment, the action of a moment, and the anticipation of a moment. Pictures merely freeze the moment.

The look of utter hatred for America photographed on the face of an Iraqi soldier or a Somali guerrilla is powerful, but it pales in comparison to the vitriolic history and bitter experience of confrontation that words can capture, explore, retrace and record in much the same space given to a news photograph.

Every word is a picture. That's what photography is up against.

I won't deny that often one photograph is worth a thousand poorly chosen words and thoughtlessly constructed sentences, but a thousand of the best words put together with care and sensitivity and with the skill of a talented thinker and artist can reduce a photograph to the cheap chemistry or electronics that it is.

Before we had photographs, we had drawings and paintings -- and words. We seem to be condemned to words (Merleau-Ponty argued we are condemned to meaning).

We have tons of pictures of the American Civil War, and they are intriguing. There are times one gets the impression North and South fought the war to introduce Americans to photography. But if we truly want to know and understand that war, we must go to its literature; to its words.

There are some who argue that words distort but photographs provide true pictures. Don't believe it.

First of all, the photographer edits. He or she puts in the frame of the camera only what he or she wants to be recorded.

Second, the photographer's equipment lies. Any honest photographer will admit that portraits come out quite differently when taken with a 28mm lens, which will flatten one's face and widen one's eyes and smile, and a 75mm lens, which will probably flatter its subject.

With a so-called long lens, a photographer can pull the background unrealistically close to the subject. Television producers use this technique during car chase scenes, making speeding autos several yards apart appear on screen as though they are just missing each other.

It takes words to give one the truth about what's going on in those photos, which also is why news photos carry captions and cut lines.

So, the next time someone says "one picture is worth a thousand words," smile and simply respond, "not a thousand good words."

Besides, if pictures are so good, how come they talk so much on the six o'clock news?

Allan R. Andrews can be contacted at allan.andrews@reporters.net

The above column is a slightly edited and altered version of one he wrote in March 1994
for the Pacific Sunday Magazine in Pacific Stars and Stripes.

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