“Is a picture really worth a
thousand words? What thousand words? A thousand words from a lunatic, or a
thousand words from Nietzsche? Actually, Nietzsche was a lunatic, but you see
my point. What about a thousand words from a rambler vs. 500 words from Mark
Twain? He could say the same thing quicker and with more force than almost any
other writer. One thousand words from Ginsberg are not even worth one from
Wilde. It’s wild to declare the equivalency of any picture with any army of
1,000 words. Words from a writer like Wordsworth make you appreciate what words
are worth.”
Jarod Kintz
I am always surprised by other people – their perspectives continue to
amaze me. This is mostly because, in the day-to-day rush of life, the
perspective we rely on the most is our own. It is our default setting to always
enforce our truth as absolute. Somehow it makes us feel safer in the chaos of
what we encounter. As much as we’d like to believe otherwise, very little in
our lives is cast in stone. And so we cling to our beliefs, our attitudes, our
opinions, in the hopes that we will find certainty in that.
But are these beliefs, attitudes and opinions we hold of any real value?
How can we know for sure? Jarod Kintz provides some interesting insight in this
regard. I’ve read his observations about the connection between pictures and
words many times, and looked at the connection as being one of trade-off.
Either say the words or present the picture. Both cannot exist simultaneously.
An exchange must occur. However, in reading it recently, a new revelation came
upon me. The value of pictures and words is not quantifiable. The true value of
picture and words is, rather, qualifiable – it lies in the value the poetry of
words and pictures add to our understanding of our own worth, and our own
capabilities as human beings.
And so, words and pictures do not exist in an either/or scenario. They
exist in a relationship. Pictures can
speak, and words can show. They are
our teachers, and neither can be disregarded at the expense of the other.
Consider the following:
Below is Steve McCurry’s photograph of the ‘Afghan Girl’. To know her
suffering is to see this picture. Her eyes speak volumes – they communicate her
beliefs, her attitudes and her opinions about her world:
Now read the description of this image by Laura Cole:
Her “haunting” “sea-green”
eyes became the talk of many and the nameless girl was soon the face of
humanitarian campaigns and photographic journals alike (Braun; Newman). Those
green eyes that lift off the gloss of the page and her “ambiguous” expression
are at once a profound message and a work of art (McCurry qtd. in Phaidon).
Entirely myth-like she provoked the dark associations of her war ravaged
country as well as those of her age and sex, her connotations encompassed by
both halves of her only namesake “Afghan” and “girl” while her name encompassed
the issues of her entire country. Thus, in having no name she represented the
children, women and conflict of Soviet-occupied Afghanistan: a child of the
socio-political context of 1985. Lacking her own, the Afghan girl acquired the
names of thousands of other Afghans as well as the might of the Soviet campaign
and conversely the Western interest in the region. She is by extension, the
culmination of all these myths.
Is McCurry’s photograph more valuable than Cole’s description?
If we can answer this, I believe, we will truly know our own worth.
Author:
Mary-Anne
Potter
