April 2010
A photograph is worth exactly as much as a word,
provided that both serve their own uniqueness.
If someone loves and respects photography, they must necessarily love and respect the word as well. Because only then will photography take its special place, which justifies its existence. Aphorisms like 'a thousand words are worth a photo' degrade both photography and the word.
The uniqueness of each medium arises from its capacity for abstraction. The most substantial words refer to abstract concepts, although very specific in their generality. Words, for instance, 'love,' 'fear,' 'death' are impossible to define even through thousands of words. Similarly, if a photograph can be described in descriptive words, it probably is a weak photograph, or more precisely, an illustrative one.
The presence of photography in various journalistic prints initially benefited from the element of surprise and interest characterizing the public's attitude. Even then, in the pre-war years, photography could relatively maintain its uniqueness. However, it was later used for the sake of convenience. It became the pathway for bypassing the word. Its extensive and thoughtless use led to two evils: firstly, it degraded the importance of the word and forced it to follow it on the path of impression, and secondly, it not only degraded but almost erased the abstract and suggestive power of the photography itself, limiting it to a schematic, summarizing, and slogan-based illustration of the surface of the word. These two distortions led to the novel and omnipotent presence of the caption, a neologism meaning that the essence is removed from both the word and the photograph, and a terse and arbitrary verbal interpretation of the supposed illustrative photograph is enlisted.
Since photography gained the titles of its artistic nobility, things worsened. Because alongside the pursuit of impression, the worship of form was cultivated, which, when it moves on the surface, ensures even better the impression. To all this must be added the galloping multiplication of prints, which on one hand caused an unbridled photographic overproduction, and on the other a mithridatism of the reading public, which, having been led to the point of contempt for the word (let's not forget that the flowing text is often characterized as 'pilaf'), ended up also with ennui towards photographic images. Now the reader's gaze must be fed with more and more impressive (thus more superficial) shots and with ever more slogan-like (thus again superficial) captions. To entertain the 'pilaf', large elements of the text's phrases are interspersed, limiting it to its supposed essence (i.e., anew to its most frivolous characteristics). In a few seconds, the reader will scan the headlines, the caption, and the photograph and turn the page feeling (and this is the worst) informed, aware, sometimes even (always superficially) moved.
There is no proven advice for exiting this vicious cycle. Except perhaps from an effort to let photography and the word return to their substantial difficulty. The word in its (luxurious) duration and the photograph in its (humble) simplicity. Therefore, far fewer photographs and certainly not descriptive and illustrative of events. Ideally, a single autonomous, self-sufficient, abstract, concise photograph would suffice to accompany and support a substantive, complex article.
This, however, presupposes that both the reading public and photographers/journalists will prioritize the difficulty of thought and knowledge over the ease of emotions and instincts and realize that adding a photograph to a text should make it more complex, not simpler."
Plato Rivellis