Some pictures aren’t worth any words at all…

Mike Gilmore, who helped compile two of the most startling collections of images for Borkowski PR (Improperganda and Unseen), wonders if newspapers know how to use photos properly anymore.

Of course, you’re all great students of the work of Kung Fu Tze.  Or maybe Confucius.  Or possibly not.

It was either Tze or Confucius who said “one picture is better than one hundred sayings”.  Either way, both could have saved themselves a lot of time if they’d followed their own advice.  They could have dashed off a few sketches one afternoon and cut out years of sitting around being inscrutable.

Inflation being what it is, some thousand or  more years later, the original proverb was re-cast by Frederick R.Barnard into: “one picture is worth ten thousand words”.  Possibly this was a canny pitch for business directed at cost-conscious publishers, since Barnard was an illustrator and he made the pronouncement in an article in “Printers’ Ink”. 

Never mind, the idea is now firmly entrenched in everyone’s consciousness: images communicate with more clarity and economy than copy.  For the media, it’s an important dictum, and one that it takes to heart.  Pages of local and national papers are peppered with pictures.

Take a look at my local rag (The Tavistock Times Gazette).  The latest edition features 440,000 words worth of images, if Barnard and his Chinese forebears are to be believed.  Looking at the national media, today’s Sun has over 1,000,000 words in pictures.  That has to be a good eight full-length novels by anyone’s reckoning, or (based on the average Sun-reader reading age) 2,000 copies of The Hungry Caterpillar.

The ten thousand words rule is profoundly disproved by both these publications.  A picture of seven Saga-aged gardeners standing in a line beside a spade in a flower bed alongside the caption “Nancy Fortescue prepares to plant a rare magnolia”?  A picture of Jonathan King in a baseball cap outside a prison holding his thumbs up under the headline “Free: Pop Paedo Who Abused Young Boys”?

These pictures are simple illustrations, aids to the memory, so that next time we see Nancy down in Tesco we can say “I saw you in the paper: that looked like a nice spade” and – if we get to see him anywhere – we’ll know it’s Jonathan and we can commit GBH knowing we’ll get off with mitigating circumstances.  Without exception, the images in both the Tavistock Times Gazette and The Sun are purely functional.  As are the majority of images in hundreds of other publications.

The pictures that truly fulfil the Confucian proverb are few and far between in today’s media environment, although some newspapers (The Independent, for example) still have a strong visual aesthetic.  It’s unsurprising.  The rampant expansion of print media means that there is a demand for ever more images.  This, coupled with cost-cutting, diminishes the chances of quality images ever used.

Take The Sun: all Sun journalists are now issued with high quality digital mobiles, so that they can MMS shock horror images across to the news room as the action’s happening.  It saves money on professional photographers, and it’s got the grainy, wobbly, useless-photo style credibility-edge that suits current reality culture.  Whatever a celebrity was getting up to that he or she claimed he or she wasn’t, if the picture in the paper looks crap, it has to be true.   

Confucius/Tze spoke the truth: there are pictures that are brilliant, inspired, illuminating and extraordinary and that communicate more meaning, to more people, more directly than any amount of text ever could. 

Speaking only for myself, they are pictures that capture some of the most extreme moments in recent human history – moments that without the photographer as witness might never have been believed; they’re pictures that not only depict an event, but which call into question significant personal, moral, and political concerns; they’re pictures that crystallise the most complex of issues in a shot that maybe lasted one hundredth of a second; they’re pictures that demand personal engagement and that are profoundly moving and stir a deep emotional response.

Comments

[Stuart Bruce]

I was delighted to receive the recent copy of Behind the Spin that came with CIPR's Profile. I'm therefore pleased to be able to read more on this blog.

One improvement could be to the list of PR Blogs. There are now several UK-based PR blogs and it would be good to see them all listed. Drew B has a good list here:

http://theblogconsultancy.typepad.com/ukprbloglist/

[Drew B]

Thanks for the link Stuart!