Finding fresh realities …
Looking at pictures. Looking at anything. The huge majority of us see the world through our eyes. But what we think we see and what’s actually there to be seen are often different things.
Language helps define how we understand our world and that includes how we understand any images we see. But language only depicts realities – and our realities are our own. How we respond to all the realities we’re presented with each and every day has been learned and is individual. Indeed, both your emotional and your rational responses to anything you’re dealing with in life are personal.
Of course, there are any number of factors coming in to play, feeding in to how you are and thus how you respond to anything. From your genetic inheritance to your upbringing, from your family to your education, from the town you live in to the country, from the culture you’re immersed in to the culture you embrace … and so on and so on. How that all comes together in you personally is just that, a personal thing.
That said, for all our individual variety there’s a lot of commonality too. Whoever we are, it rarely takes much quizzing to find things in common with someone else. We humans are by nature social animals, and we succeed in being so because we have so much that’s shared.
But that commonality has its downsides. Whether you’re creating something – anything – that’s going to be ‘consumed’ by someone else, or whether you’re the person doing the consuming, it’s hard to remain fresh in how you respond to what’s out there. It’s easy to take things for granted – particularly familiar things. Indeed, it is easy to not even realize you are taking things for granted.
And that takes me to black and white images. (My main interest here is with photos, but you can apply all this to other images too.)
For most of us, whatever a scene may be, the world isn’t black and white. It’s not the world our eyes see. We see in colour. Thus, a black and white picture, by being inherently ‘unrealistic’, asks you to use your own brain to ‘finish’ the image.
The image provides you with some information. Any accompanying text might provide you with more. If there’s no specific accompanying text, there’s still the language-based knowledge you already have, informing you as you look at the picture. But what you then do with what you’ve been provided with is up to you.
Keep in mind, too, that the picture and the words often won’t be giving you the whole story: they can provide different things, leaving you to fill in different gaps. Some things can’t be said and some things can’t be photographed. When an image is black and white that in itself leaves you having to do more work.
Being asked to use your brain is a good thing. You get more out of your life if you’re thinking about it, if you’re not taking things for granted. A black and white image provides both a reason to exercise your brain and – through you doing so – an opportunity to lead a fuller life. And you only live once.
As for accuracy … It’s a photo-saturated world we now live in. Meaning and impact diminishes as saturation increases. It all gets overwhelmed by its over-familiarity. Without a personal aspect – ‘me and my friend on holiday’ – every picture becomes ‘just another picture’, a ‘so what’ thing. In this context, the accuracy of photos increasingly becomes neither here nor there. Add AI-manipulated or -generated images and judging a picture is anything other than simple.
However …
Rather than having accuracy as the main issue when taking or looking at a picture, perhaps there’s something better that can be done. Perhaps worrying about accuracy is a barrier to imagination, to potential.
Perhaps a new role for images and accompanying text is to help create links between different realities. Linking, sharing ideas; informing with pictures and with words.
Yes, caution needs to be applied – is what’s being offered trustworthy? But caution is and always has been necessary for all information we are and ever have been presented with, in all formats.
But with caution, with checking and verification, newly, freshly linked realities can give us all the ability to think and act in new ways – and the power that comes with that.
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