Sejal Says, " Pictures Don't Tell The Whole Story"

Words and pictures typically play an equal, important role in our daily lives. Whether the picture is used as the main source of communication of the words are, the other one is often joined with it to create a multi-faceted story for any audience. But, the sad truth of society is that pictures can typically be altered or cut-off to be misleading for viewers.

When writers explain their thoughts or arguments, words sometimes seem biased but it is easy to see these biases. When pictures are used, it is very easy to omit information leaving the readers in this gray area where they are predisposed to blindly listen to the person who published the picture. McCloud discusses this dilemma of the importance of words and pictures and he comes to a consensus that "as children, our first books had pictures galore" but as we grew up and got more mature we began to read novels with "no pictures at all". McCloud is discussing how the loss of innocence made us transition from using primarily pictures to using none at all. Scholars have lead us to believe that words are more valuable than pictures into our heads. But it is not that words are more valuable but words are simply more accurate.

One prevalent example of the bias that occurs with pictures can be seen in the following picture. This picture is known as the "Saigon Execution". This photo was taken by an American photographer during the Vietnam War on February 1st, 1968.

When looking at this photo, many people will often make a disturbed face as they are witnessing a defenseless man being casually executed. This photo makes people outraged due to the loss of humanity that was brought over by the war. And I completely agree, how can war bring people to commit tasks like these without a blink of the eye. 

The photographer's primary purpose for publishing this photo was to incite a feeling of loss in viewers so that they will feel motivated to send help for the war and stop this injustice from carrying on. This photograph exposed the dehumanizing reality of war and helped society see why this war must come to an end.

Now, you might be thinking where is this story going? But, the sad reality is that the man who is about to be executed is a member of the Viet Cong Terrorist Squad and the man pulling the trigger is a police chief for South Vietnam-allies of the United States. So now the truth is revealed. Citizens of the US were outraged by this act of war when the wrongdoing was being committed by the non-Communist, American Allies. After the photo was published, the police chief was essentially exiled by his community for committing this act of unjust violence.

So with this example in mind, did the photographer care about the impact of his photograph? Did he purposefully leave out any commentary to protect the identity of the police chief? Overall, photographs can be misleading and photographers possess the power to change minds without any words to go with it. Imagine the difference in response if the photographer had included commentary about every person involved and what was going on.

This is why pictures don't tell the whole story so words should be viewed as the primary source of communication.