Text > Image > Text – Reading photographs and words

Text Image Text lead image
Flood wrecks woodland after giant ogre destroys dam…

A picture tells a thousand words. But there are cases where a dozen words can redefine a picture.

In his 1977 publication Image Music Text critic Roland Barthes observed how text can often become parasitical upon images. This happens both in spaces like galleries and exhibitions, where wall-mounted captions can supersede what the eye observes in an art piece, or in printed photograph captions where a description of an image can often clash with what the image actually shows. Barthes‘ theory proposes that the closer text is to an image the less more incorporated it becomes, so with image captions that sit outside an image more can possibly be inferred than by words trapped inside an image.

Although the strength of a good image can outweigh the impact of the text upon it, this does still present words an unbalanced power over images Continue reading “Text > Image > Text – Reading photographs and words”

Nice Photo, If It Wasn’t Photoshopped – Authentic photography

This image used colour, exposure and lens adjustments in photoshop to create an “infrared” effect.

More and more frequently I seem to become engulfed in a debate about whether or not a photographic image is “authentic”. I recently had it out with a friend who works as a photographer and designer, who argued that photographic images that are manipulated by Photoshop are not as good as process-based photographs created in the field using only the camera. Personally I can’t see the difference. Continue reading “Nice Photo, If It Wasn’t Photoshopped – Authentic photography”

Beautiful Decay: Objects falling into history

Paint forced out by the inflation of tarnished metal beneath in paper-thin scrapings like filmy slices of whittled wood. Chunky number buttons with finger indentations on telephones that crunch in with a satisfying click. Orange and dusk-red rusts on old bicycle frames that harbour a beautiful variety of lichen in an array of sanguine tones. Windowless stone buildings with determined blades of grass growing forcibly through the gaps in the cold cobbled floor.

There is something resoundingly beautiful about the ruins of our recent past. The history and stories trapped inside objects that have fallen into ruin Continue reading “Beautiful Decay: Objects falling into history”