IMAGE ISN’T EVERYTHING : When a Picture Is Worth Only a Hundred Words, Use Your Head Instead
What is it about us and pictures?
Still or moving, the recorded image has courted us and won us over. Pictures spill out of our wallets and fill up our VCRs. They memorialize our vacations and crystallize our politics.
And yet we smile indulgently at primitives’ fanciful notion that pictures steal their souls. Keep smiling. Bit by bit, we are letting pictures steal our minds.
Like Gresham’s law, the tsunami of images can crowd out our other faculties: judgment and analysis. Many of the people who declared that pictures told the whole story in the Rodney King beating are now saying that pictures do not tell the whole story in the Reginald Denny beating. And people who said that the Rodney King video did not tell the whole story now contend that a videotape is all the evidence needed to convict the men who set upon Reginald Denny.
A jury in Simi Valley thought there was more to the truth than the King videotape. A jury in Los Angeles may think there is more to the truth than the Denny videotape.
And then what? When will we be convinced that seeing is not always believing, that truth is not always bounded by the parameters of a viewfinder? Consider:
* John DeLorean on videotape, gloating over an attache case full of cocaine that he says was “better than gold.” A jury acquitted him. The pictures were true, but not the whole truth.
* Marion Barry on videotape, smoking crack cocaine in a hotel room. In the end, he was convicted of a misdemeanor that had nothing to do with the videotape.
* The National Football League, once enamored of instant replays, has gone back to trusting the judgment of the human eye and the wisdom of the brain.
- And that home movie of Abe Zapruder’s, shot from a grassy knoll by a Texas expressway, of a president’s head being blown apart--that sure settled all the questions, didn’t it?
When I taught journalism at USC, one of the first assignments I gave my students was to watch a half-hour network newscast with the sound turned off and write down all the facts they could gather from the pictures alone.
There’s some riveting footage of a burning building, but where is it? What started it? War or accident? There are men with guns, but are they the good guys or the bad guys? Is that the inaugural fireworks display over the Potomac or the aerial bombardment of Baghdad?
The students who got the best grades wrote down the least because a picture conveys more sensation than information. A picture of a burning building is mute. It is vivid but not eloquent, literal but not comprehensive. It can arouse but not resolve.
A picture also can’t analyze or remember; it can only help us to do so. Because pictures shape our recall, they shape our present and our history. I can remember the milestones of TV families more clearly than some of my own. That is a powerful thing to hand over to image-makers, as every political adviser in America knows and counts on.
Just as Winston Smith doctored history’s photo album in the novel “1984,” the tabloids once crudely altered reality with what looked to be manicure scissors: Liz Taylor, arm in arm with the man of the week. We knew the picture was phony, but it was fun, like seeing someone pose with a cardboard cutout of Bill Clinton. We indulge the illusion of the camera’s never lying when we actually know better.
At least we are supposed to know better. The science is more adroit now. Computers add and erase figures seamlessly, Zelig-fashion. Still, we lazily let pictures close the debate, rather than start it. A camera is only a machine. One human mind controls it, and another human mind reacts to the images it makes. When we let the camera do our thinking, we cede to it more power than primitives ever have.
Keep that in mind the next time you see that videotape, or that other videotape.
