Images and their meaning

A.

A picture is worth a thousand words. That line is known to many people and a single picture actually can transcend race, religion, or language. A picture can be the rallying cry of a country that financially backs a war (Marines Raising the Flag on Iwo Jima, 1945 (Wood 204) ), the image that makes millions of people witness the devastation that is war (little Vietnamese girl burned by napalm running down the street), or evidence of miracles during a cold war (1980 USA hockey team celebrating their win over the USSR). Visual argument is an important and highly persuasive tool. I feel that the control a photographer has over what is in a certain visual aide is the most important tool in visual argument. By excluding, or including, certain elements to a picture, the photographer can influence their audience immensely (205). This tactic can make it so that a dangerous protester who is threatening the public safety and acting irrational, look like an innocent victim of police brutality in just one single shot. Any single picture taken at the right moment can affect an audience’s perception of the incident forever.

B.

In the McCloud reading I found myself agreeing with so many of the points made about icons. I found that the idea of how our mind can take the most simplistic of symbols and turn that into a face to be the most important feature. It demonstrates our desire to be able to relate to images and make them more familiar to us (McCloud 202-204). I find myself doing this as I write this very blog entry. Looking at an apartment complex up the hill from my back porch I can make two eyes out of windows on either side of the front door, which I have made the mouth and nose. Our conditioned perceptions of images limit our ability to place different images in different perspectives. Finally, I could really relate to how McCloud shows us that an image we see and describe as a pipe is actually not a pipe. It is simply the recreation of a sketch of a pipe; basically just ink (196).