Visual language

A recent lenswork podcast brought to mind the idea of visual language and how we read photographs. Brooks expresses an interest in information theory but really seems to be considering the shared components of visual language. The visual words & phrases we all perhaps instinctively understand - a smile, crying.

For me, the key concept in information theory has been the measure of surprise, or entropy in a message. The canonical example is the two sentences, 'dog bites man' and 'man bites dog'. The second sentence is more surprising, even though it has the same words and number of letters as the first case. But if they were newspaper headlines, the second would grab your attention - it carries more information because it has more surprise. As a result it has higher entropy in an information theoretic sense of the term. This might be analogous to the difference between images with high initial impact and those that are quieter. Lots of colour, contrast, dramatic light and unusual subjects tend to characterise images with high impact and lots of visual surprise or entropy. Calmer palettes and light might lead to less surprising content. However, what interests me more is visual language and when applied to photography, two aspects. How to read & how to write visually. First I'd like to learn how people read images. I've heard mention that Westerners read photographs in the same way we read normally. Starting at the top left and working our way back and forth to the bottom right. If that's true - how can we use it ? Basic guidelines talk about rule of thirds and power points on those intersections - but if we scan a picture from top left to bottom right, does it then mean that each of those 4 places on a picture have different impact ? I think so. You can see that this is true by flipping rotating and mirroring images and notice how it changes the feel of them. This idea also can help with the placement of leading lines or other compositional elements, to change the way the picture is scanned. Other features such as the brightest area of the image or areas of highest contrast will also grab our eye, just like a surprising headline will make your eye jump ahead. So if Western cultures read images the same way that we read text, is that also true for other cultures that read top to bottom, or right to left ? Are images and composition significantly or subtly different in those cultures as a result ? Is the way we scan an image something more instinctual than that, or really driven by our education ? Secondly, knowing about these concepts and incorporating them consciously into your images can really improve the overall feel. Eventually it becomes more of an unconscious act that becomes part of your visual way of writing. I'd love to learn more about the way we scan or read images so if anyone has good pointers or references, please leave me a comment. But that just touches on the layout on the page. What you are saying is equally or more important than how you say it. There are certainly some universal visual phrases that you can use - sunsets, a smile, a baby crying. Everyone that looks at the picture understands those symbols straight away. But there are also more complex phrases, that are culturally relevant. These become harder to read if you aren't part of that culture. As an example, consider the use of colour. Red in some cultures for weddings, white in others. Or red for Communism. Black & orange symbolise Hallowe'en. In China, white is considered the colour associated with funerals. White hooded robes in some cultures are a sign of hatred, in others the robes of very religious, pious men. A cross. A flag. All powerful short-hand for specific ideas. Using these stronger symbols can be very open to subjective interpretation - the viewer may well see and understand things in a very different way to the photographer. Brooks mentioned Robert Franks series 'The Americans'. I checked that book out of the library a couple of years ago and was singularly unimpressed. The images didn't mean much to me. Didn't make much sense - I couldn't understand all the praise heaped on that collection. It wasn't until a few weeks ago, while listening to a Jeff Curto lecture, where he described one of the images, that I started to understand the symbols and perhaps the power and significance of Franks other images. There is one image, in a diner, with a blown out window, a TV on, and nobody in the room. Curto describes the cultural fear of a nuclear holocaust, symbolised in the white window. He also explains that the TV is showing a famous at the time TV evangelist. Symbolising the preaching of religion and morals in the US - but nobody is listening. All of these symbols and ideas encapsulated in that image, but none of them registered with me. I didn't understand the nuclear zeitgeist or recognise the symbolic preacher. So the picture passed right over my head. Symbols are powerful phrases in photography, but only when they connect with the viewer who gets what you are saying. I also wonder if there is a visual equivalent to sentence construction. Some languages such as German tend to have the verb at the end. English has a different structure. Is this sort of re-arranging of the phrases and basic building blocks present in visual language too ? More importantly, can these ideas be used to change how you compose a picture to give more or less impact and in the end, to communicate ideas more effectively ? To do that, there's perhaps the even harder first step of working out what you want to say - what does the subject or scene in front of you make you feel and want to communicate ? Only then can you start thinking about how you want to say it.