I’m a print person. Although I worked many years at a television news station, I love putting words on a page, trying to get the right one. I’m in the minority since most people are picture people. They believe indeed that a picture is worth a thousand words, so why waste your time reading. Shamefully, it was a newspaper editor, Arthur Brisbane, who in 1911 coined the saying about pictures trumping words. However, it was popularized by a leading practitioner of advertising, Fred Barnard, who lied that it was a Chinese proverb, so people would take it seriously.
I started my career on a newspaper, the Providence Journal, in its Newport bureau. I wrote thousands of words about all sorts of things. I also carried a camera at times, an old speed graphic I had to lug around, the kind you see in old movies. Did my stories make the front page? Occasionally. My pictures? More often. Sigh.
I will admit I really liked pictorial journalism as a child. I grew up during the popularity of Henry Luce’s Life Magazine. It was the foremost practitioner of photojournalism, from 1936 through the 1960s. While Life, the magazine, contained words, and at times it even presented lengthy books in serial form such as Hemingway’s The Old Man and the Sea, the focus was news photography. It was the visual medium before television. Our family subscribed to Life, along with 8.5 million others, and I recall hurrying home from high school on Thursdays (I think it was) to see what it featured that week. It claimed then to reach quarter of the US population. Meanwhile, Luce’s print-oriented Time magazine, while older (it began in 1923) had at most a subscription list of 4 million, less than half Life’s.
Today, on the Internet, I’m constantly frustrated by people who put up videos which take five or twenty minutes to watch, instead of summarizing the information contained in them in words which would perhaps take 30 seconds to read. People, though, like watching pictures – if only of a talking head – rather than taking the effort to read. You don’t have to be literate to look at a picture. And a picture, a photograph, or more vividly, a video, seems to takes you there. It’s real.
It isn’t. Photographs, film, and video aren’t reality. They may come from a camera pointed at what we call reality – unlike paintings or (goodness help us!) AI images. Even if unaltered, only consisting of what the camera took, photographs can and often do mislead. Photographs are of an instant. Reality last longer. An example: no matter what has happened during a contest – be it a sports event, or an election, for instance the winner is always shown smiling, the loser frowning or sad. That’s because the photographer believes that a winner should smile, and a loser must frown – even if that may not be the case. The winner might dread what she is about to face; the loser may be relieved that she lost. But everyone changes his expression many times over time. So the photographer can and does catch what he thinks is the appropriate one. Winners smile; losers don’t.
Video and film are from seconds or minutes, or very occasionally hours long. Still, it’s a snippet of time which may or may not be representative of what has happened. And there’s another factor that video and film have: they are almost different sequences put together into one. Our interpretation of what we see is very much influenced by the sequence of images put together. Among the first people to recognize how important was the sequence in which images are put was were Soviet film makers in the 1920. They used it for propaganda purposes.
The Soviets developed what became called montage theory. The sequence of images is what develops a film’s power. Editing the images together is as important, if not more so, in conveying a message as the content of the shots alone. An important theorist of montage theory was Sergei Eisenstein. His silent film, Battleship Potemkin, is considered by many film critics as one of the greatest films ever. The film is dramatic. A powerful scene is of the massacre carried out by the Tsar’s troops on the Odessa steps. First comes the boots of Tsarist soldiers marching down the steps; then a baby in a carriage falling down the steps; then a wide shot of the massacre. The fact that there was never a massacre on the Odessa steps fails to diminish to scene’s power, and many were convinced it happened, due in large part to the emotional response the sequence of images create.
When I worked for television, a news director introduced me to Eisenstein’s ideas about montage. Use montage, ethically (of course) to tell a vivid story – the real truth -- at least as you, the camera person, and the editor understand it. The technique doesn’t make all television news misleading. It does mean that video, like photography, is always shaped by the understanding of the human beings creating it. It is not reality, whatever reality is. Video presented by media in magazines, in newsreels, on television on the Internet, may appear to take you there, to what actually happened. The fire hose of images overwhelms the senses and can be exciting and powerful, but sometimes wrong.
At college I had a teacher who would rant about Life Magazine, which was still a dominant in the 1960s. Back then I wondered why a person who taught writing and literature hated the magazine I had grown up with. Now I see that writing – print on a page – can express complexity and ambiguity. Is Hamlet a hero or a whinny procrastinator? Macbeth a villain or hen pecked husband? Was Julius Caesar a tyrant or a statesman? Is Trump a blowhard or a scheming autocrat? Well, both. You explore complexity in prose. That is much harder to do, and often impossible, in visual media, with pictures. That, I think, is why I prefer to write.
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