You’ve heard it before. A picture is worth a thousand words. And we love them: images, because of their depth, their layers of insight. A picture tells us so much, not only of it’s subject, but insinuations are made to it’s creator as well. Their eye, their thoughts and emotions bleed into the frame. Seeing is believing, and so often if we don’t understand, we need to see it to get the picture.
Now a days our world is saturated with images. From advertisements that carry connotations of sex and mystery, to news media that inflames, and infuriates. All the while flooded by a steady stream of social media pictures. All together that’s a lot of words, a lot of thoughts and facts and feeling, and it can be a bit much. It washes over us, desensitizing us to a degree from the images that might have otherwise had a dramatic impact on our lives.
Images carry power. Sometimes it’s unspeakable or intangible, but its a strong emotion every viewer shares. Other times the picture might be veiled or vague, an elicit drastically different reactions from viewers based on their past.
I want to start a new Album, a bit of a study. I’d like to publish a picture here every week and accompany it with one thousand words that I associate with the image. Sometimes that might be what it says to me, what it’s of, experiences or memories it dredges up, or maybe just what I was doing when I took it.
One thousand words can be a lot, so I might not always make it, after all I’ve written about two hundred seventy words at this point and said pretty much all there is to say. This is an introduction with a bit of accountability thrown in as well. If I manage to run with this theme for a while, I thought it might be helpful to have a post to kind of explain it. The accountability might be more apparent to me as I haven’t published here in a while, but whether or not it actually encourages me to do the work remains to be seen.
Some pictures we look at ever day, whether they’re on the wall or background of our computer. Their story changes and evolves. Other images we haven’t seen for years, but their sight is familiar and nostalgic. Every picture is hiding it’s thousand words, and I hope that by sharing a few of mine here, we might be able to slow down and appreciate the depth of some of the more profound images that wash over us every day.