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As usual, context matters. If you're trying to convey complex thoughts about abstract matters, then language is the way to do it. If you are trying to convey de

• BeetleB 6y ago
  Strong disagree on photos. I find photos to be an excellent way to convey emotions that didn't exist. Also very common to have multiple people conclude very different things from a photo. Very misleading. I'll also add that well written prose has moved me (and many others) emotionally in more powerful ways than any photo ever has. Your Great Depression era photo conveys emotions only because of the context around it - context I know primarily because of text. If I showed this photo to a relative of mine half way across the world, they would merely see an ordinary woman with two sleepy kids.
  • LordDragonfang 6y ago
    >Also very common to have multiple people conclude very different things from a photo. But that's true for text, too. The US just had a very major politicized event where two sides had two wildly different conclusions over what one man's words meant. And there's a grand legal tradition of taking one specific document and interpreting what its words mean and applying it to a plethora of situations. There's plenty of people that come to wildly different conclusions over what certain amendments do or do not mean. Hell, look at literary analysis! You can give people a book like 1984, and some people will say in all confidence that it is explicitly anti-socialism, when the author said the literal opposite. And that's something with a supposedly clear ideological message, to say nothing of works with less concrete themes.
    • BeetleB 6y ago
      The ideological message in 1984 is anything but clear when you compare it to what the message would look like had George Orwell merely written a nonfiction treatise, without resorting to any literary devices. If you know nothing of Orwell or the historical importance of 1984 and you read the book, it certainly wouldn't be clear that Orwell was trying to make a point, let alone what that point is. Some people would guess it does, others would say "It's just a story." Orwell intentionally obfuscated his point in choosing the mode of delivery (fiction). Indeed, this intentional obfuscation/ambiguity by fiction writers is what keeps literature professors employed. The difference is that you can read a work like 1984 and at least know it is fiction, and that the message, if any, is hidden. Whereas you cannot look at a photo and easily tell if it's documenting what you think it is, no matter how much the photographer tries. At best you can see the shapes, and to a much lesser extent, things like colors/contrast. What the photographer was trying to convey is much more open to interpretation than 1984 is.
      • LordDragonfang 6y ago
        Sorry, when I said "clear ideological point" I meant "clear that some ideological point was being made", not that it was clear what the message was. I thought I made that clear by immediately pointing out that people disagree on what the point of the story is. The fact that I'm even having to make this clarification is kind of the point of my argument. And that you can even argue that it wouldn't be clear that 1984 is trying to make a point is evidence that text is not inherently clear. Also, I don't know how you can claim that it's easier to tell what text is documenting than a picture. It's much easier to lie with text.
        • BeetleB 6y ago
          > And that you can even argue that it wouldn't be clear that 1984 is trying to make a point is evidence that text is not inherently clear. No, it's evidence that George Orwell was obfuscating his point. When you make a point through fiction, that is obfuscation. To make my point clear, had you made a faithful version of 1984 into a movie, people who know nothing of the book would still not be clear about whether it has a point or not. It has nothing to do with it being in text form. > Also, I don't know how you can claim that it's easier to tell what text is documenting than a picture. It's much easier to lie with text. The two are not contradictory. It's easy to tell what is being documented. Whether it is true is a different story. The crux of my discussion isn't about what happens when the author/photographer is intentionally trying to mislead, but when they are not trying to mislead. If an author writes a nonfiction treatise it leaves a lot less room for ambiguity. When I read PG's essays, I don't have discussions with others on what he really means. A photo, without context, can inspire several emotions, all unrelated to reality, and this is true no matter how hard the photographer tries. Case in point, when I was in school, my teacher showed the class a photo he had taken from a newspaper - but without any context. He asked the students to try to write a news article where the photo would make sense. Obviously, the responses were widely different, and none was close to the reality. In some stories, the subjects in the photos were victims. In others, they were the villians. The reality turned out to be their being heroes. Even when you provide accurate context to a photo, there are no shortage of instances where once you see the video of the event and/or hear from the subject, you find out that while the context was correct, the photo is showing a mere moment that is not reflecting what most people who see the photo are thinking. Take a video of someone having a long conversation, where they laugh often. It's not hard to capture a frame where it looks like the person is in pain.
• airstrike 6y ago
  Sure, and the author recognizes that. FTA: "Pictures may be worth a thousand words, when there's a picture to match what you're trying to say."
• Nitramp 6y ago
  John Steinbeck arguably did that for your first image: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Grapes_of_Wrath https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Grapes_of_Wrath It's not really apples to apples of course. Steinbeck describes much more, but also takes much more time to consume. The point though is that it's possible to convey very complex emotional states in literature or poetry
  • handedness 6y ago
    For anyone who isn't familiar with the subject of that photo: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Florence_Owens_Thompson https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Florence_Owens_Thompson
  • johnfn 6y ago
    I mean, if your best argument is that one of the greatest authors of a generation needed an entire book to capture the emotion of a single picture, that argument doesn’t seem very strong to me :)
• nirav 6y ago
  Abstract thoughts are conveyed with a class of language, this has not worked well in its predominance historically ( only math survived) similarly how music is communicated but not accepted as a universal language.