| May. 9th, 2005 @ 12:10 pm Becoming a visual culture |
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We are not becoming a visual culture. I find this idea to be mildly absurd. Will Eisner pointed out that image and text is an artificial distinction. I'm fairly certain that he wasn't the first to see this either. But text is just as much a visual element as an picture. You use the same organs and the same sense to imbue words with meaning as you do images. Most people would say that words are collections of letters, but they would be mistaken. Of course, on a certain level words are a collection of letters, but we don't read them that way. At least, people that have been reading the language the words are written in for a while don't read them that way. We actually see shapes constructed of other smaller shapes and recognize them as words. That is why a large number of misspelled words get missed in proofreading, the fact that the shape of a word is more or less accurate while the actual letters involved are incorrect.
But all of that is really beside the point. We are not becoming a visual culture. If we allow that text is somehow not an image, then we are still not becoming a visual culture. What we are doing is returning to our natural state of using images to convey meaning. If we look at the grand scale of things, text has been important for what two or three hundred years? Ever since Gutenberg sorted out that movable type thing. Before that words were important to the elite few, but so were images. Just look at all of the narrative tapestries and frescoes from the same period where there was a "primacy of text". Images hold sway even there. In the movie 28 Days Later one of the characters near the end is talking about everyone on the planet dying being a "return to normalcy" for the planet as a whole. To me, in the field of communication a "return to normalcy" is a return to the primacy of image complemented by text. In short, the natural state of communication is the comic format.
I need to nail down how exactly text works in a different way than images as we accept them. Definitions are slippery things. While an image of a tree definitely implies a particular tree, that one in the picture, it can also be more readily symbolic or evocative of certain emotions. The word "tree", to me anyway, has little symbolic force, other than as a pointer to those wooden things with the leafy bits on top. But the word is more generic, by saying "tree" I could be talking about a pine tree or a maple and you would never know until I let you in on that extra piece of information. But a picture of a pine tree is a picture of a pine tree. Image and text both have weird faults, that seem to run along the same lines. What those faults are and where they diverge, or converge, is what I need to find. But how do you do that?
Sticking with my "tree" example. The word "tree" is a little too broad. It is a universal. By saying "tree" I encompass all of tree-dom. But there is no other symbolism, unless that symbolism is injected via context, which is a different pickle altogether and I'm not going to talk about it here. Now, a drawing of a tree, talks about, if not a tree then, at least a specific type of tree. The image gives us an idea of shape, possibly color, and maybe even lets us into a bit of thought on size. But the image can also be symbolic, even without a lot of context, or the image can create its own context. A maple tree in spring looks different from the same tree in any other season. Just as a tree in morning looks different than a tree at midday or night. And each of those representations has some symbolic value. A simple progression of images of a maple tree in spring though winter tells a story. And I think it is a story that most people would understand. By altering the order of the images the story changes dramatically. Even the simple shift of changing which image to start with, but maintaining the order would alter the perception of what was happening. The problem is everyone would look at that set of maple trees and see a story, but probably not quite the same one. And that is certainly a fault of image.
Images tell stories quickly. But a thumbnail of anything is inherently flawed. and I'm losing my thread. |
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