Pictures and Words

they mutually support each other

That pictures are beyond the reach of words is a common enough belief¹. One academic² sees it this way:

‘There seems to be a divide between ‘two immiscible parts: the flood of words and the insoluble wordless image and that once we have exhausted our words there still remains something, a remainder if you will, that is immune to further analysis’.

And another³ like this:.

‘Words do many things for photographs, but in general they are used to oversee and direct them, the way parents supervise wayward children. Photographs can be bent to limitless wills, but never precisely so. They always have the potential to exceed the demands imposed upon them. And in that excess, photographs work upon us in ways we still barely comprehend’.

© Tony Cearns. Covent Garden at night.

It's a tempting idea. We have all probably felt this to be the case and it’s probably one of the reasons why we practise photography – the perceptual immediacy of it. But I take exception to the idea that words and images are ‘immiscible’. To think this is to misunderstand how things are, how we look at pictures and how language plays its role.

We are in language. We are not outside of it choosing whether to use it or not, as if it was a change of clothes.

Tomas Tranströmer, the Swedish poet wrote:

Two truths approach each other.

One comes from the inside, the other

From the outside, and where they meet

We have a chance to catch sight

Of ourselves.

This is quite a good way of thinking about the problem. A truth can only be something that can be thought (and therefore said). It is in language. The meaning of pictures can be found at their intersection with words. Having two ends to a dipole emphasises a difference. But a dipole itself exists because of an underlying continuum. Positive and negative are so in respect of the same thing. It is this which I want to briefly go into.

Traditional photographs⁴ have two distinctive qualities. Firstly, they reach back directly to a scene as if you were there in the shoes of the photographer. In the language of the academic, they are indexical and transparent. They collapse both space (you are now present at the scene, as it were) and time (you are looking at a fixed – literally – point in historical time). Secondly, in the parlance of the philosopher Nelson Goodman, they are dense. There is always something more that you can see in a photograph as opposed to the finite number of words that can be read in a sentence.

These two qualities together open a special mode of understanding. The fact that they are dense allows us to see something new each time we look. The fact that they are transparent and indexical creates a tension in that we know that we are not actually at the scene at a historical time. In fact, photographers have learned to intensify this tension. For example we get black and white photographs, we see warped lens-made perspectives, we look through unusual framing, we hold a two-dimensional print and so on. These techniques emphasise distance.

This distance allows us to start to draw, in language, distinctions, value-judgments and personal narratives. Understanding always involves distance. And as we build these personal narratives through language, we open the opportunity for these narratives to shape what we see in the photograph, and more generally.

We sit on a dipole, at one end pictures, at the other end words. We cannot interpret pictures without language, or incorporate their meanings into our narratives. In a way pictures are beyond the reach of words. They are dense. But in another way, pictures would not acquire meanings without words. It is at the intersection between pictures and words that we gain understanding.

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1 The thought belongs to a broad class of similar ideas - ‘A picture paints a thousand words’; ‘A picture is a poem without words.’ - Horace in Ars Poetica; ‘Where words are restrained, the eyes often talk a great deal.’ - Samuel Richardson in Virtue Rewarded 1740; ‘If I could say it in words, there would be no reason to paint.’ - Edward Hopper; and of course ‘The whole point of taking pictures is so that you don’t have to explain things with words.’ - Elliott Erwitt.

2. Elkins, J. (1998), ‘On pictures and the words that fail them’, Cambridge University Press.

3 David Campany (David Campany Thames & Hudson (UK), MIT Press (USA), Guilio Einaudi Editore (Italy), Eyrolles (France), Huazhong University of Science and Technology Press (China))

4. By traditional photography, I mean photographs that have the original indexical relationship to the scene depicted.