'Words are repressive while pictures are fascinating, easily understood within a particular culture and can be made personal mediums of expression'
'Visual messages, with their own rules of syntax, are being read, but this language means nothing to those who can only read words.'
'Educational psychologist Jerome Bruner of New York University cites studies that show persons only remember ten percent of what they hear, 30 percent of what they read, but about 80 percent of what they see and do.'
'Fernande Saint-Martin - Semiotics of Visual Language'
'a difficulty in finding an alphabet for images indicates the richness of communication possibilities of pictures over words.'
'photography philosopher John Berger admits that "photographs supply information without having a language of their own. Photographs quote rather than translate from reality."'
'The semiotic approach to visual communication stresses the idea that images are a collection of signs that are linked together in some way by the viewer... Semantics is an area of semiotics in which the researchers attempt to determine the significance of signs within and throughout various cultures. Syntactics is the study of the ways signs are combined with each other to form complex messages.'
'"One picture is worth a thousand words. Yes, but only if you look at the picture and say or think the thousand words." - William Saroyan
'Suzanne Langer writes that because language names relationships rather than illustrating them, "one word can take care of a situation that would require a whole sheet of drawings to depict it." For her, one word is often worth a thousand pictures.'
'Newspaper reading research has found that readers look at a photograph first, scan the caption, read the headline and if they are still interested, read the story.'
'John Berger also celebrates the word and picture collaboration:
In the relation between a photograph and words, the photograph begs for an interpretation, and the words usually supply it. The photograph, irrefutable as evidence but weak in meaning, is given meaning by the words. And the words, which by themselves remain at the level of generalization, are given specific authenticity by the irrefutability of the photograph. Together the two then become very powerful; an open question appears to have been fully answered.'
'Roland Barthes asserts that "lines satisfy the eyes while symbols satisfy the mind." But when the lines, shapes and colors have meaning, the mind is satisfied by both.''Abstract painters were the first to recognize the link between lines and symbols. The eye and the mind are one. Understanding symbols is what separates humans from other animals. It is the fundamental necessity for rational thought. For Langer, "dogs scorn our paintings because they see colored canvases, not pictures." '
Paper by Paul Martin Lester, Ph.D.
