Stories without words

If there’s one big thing that I have learned in the past four weeks, it is that Journalists are story tellers. Entertaining and informing through the telling of factual stories is what we do. Some stories are best told without written words; some stories are told without any form of structured language at all. Thus, we employ the power of the image.

Humans have evolved to observe the world around them with our keen sense of sight.As such, images speak to both the mind and the heart – they can evoke powerful emotion and beautifully depict an idea. 

The ancient Lascaux cave paintings. 

Stained glass windows depicting biblical stories that resonate with those the illiterate. Images recorded emotion and thought for the use of further generations far before words did.

It took quite some time for images to be incorporated into journalism – the 1860s illustrated line drawings provided a whole new way for readers to connect with stories, and just two decades later the age of news photojournalism was born. From 1936 onwards, readers could witness the news of the day “in nature’s hues.”

The first news line drawing graces the front page of Harper’s weekly. The first coloured news photo ‘in nature’s hues’ features in the Daily Record. 

Many years later, with the advent of digital photography, came a new age for both journalism and society in general. Thousands of images were able to be captured and uploaded with ease – making it so much easier to capture the moment. The photograph was no longer used to embellish news stories, they could be employed to tell the story itself.

 “If it makes you laugh,  if it makes you cry, if it rips out your heart, that’s a good picture" (Eddie Adams).  Legendary photographer Steve McCurry captures the essence of the moment, and with it the hearts and minds of the viewers. Photojournalism is now seen as a new and powerful medium for contemporary journalism. 

With the creative freedom accompanying digital photography and modern photojournalism came the sinister side-effects of digital manipulation (faux-tography). Photographs were no longer necessarily a sincere and realistic snapshot of a place and time, but an image that could be manipulated and distorted at the publisher’s discretion. Thus, celebrities (or indeed anyone published in a magazine) can become impossibly beautiful, almost inhuman creatures.

Any discussion on story telling with images wouldn’t be complete without mentioning the power of the moving pictures. Motion pictures and photography have developed in similar ways, have essentially the same impact on an audience and play a similar role in modern society. Television and all the forms associated with it are, of course, based entirely on the concept of the motion picture. The key difference is that photographs are about capturing the moment, while film is about capturing the scene. Both are equally important and suitably serve their respective purpose in different forms of journalism. 

To conclude, images – whether moving or still – have the capacity to tell stories in a far more profound way that words. The viewer can be transported, inspired and mesmerised and as such photojournalists can exploit their audiences to tell stories in entirely new ways.  In contemporary journalism and all media platforms excluding radio, the image is just as integral as the word.