Prompt 4

What’s that overused expression? A picture is worth a thousand words? Or better an image is worth a thousand words. 

For me images, and image-making are really important. There’s so much emphasis on the visual in contemporary life. Its not just contemporary though, because I guess focusing on the visual began ages ago. Its only been a few centuries since the establishment of social difference and the construction of racial categories occurred. And that relied upon a focus on the visual. People relied upon what cultures/things/humans/places looked like to form a large part of their judgements of those things. And we still do it. We look at a something and using our experience and context, we construct narratives based on that one visual element (so many more aspects are at play but i think the visual is the one we rely on the most). 

For me, an image, whether created or manipulated, is an object that represents something and that may have a narrative attached to it. I think photographs can be really powerful images, because of the historical quality of the medium and its ability to narrate life in a way that seems real/authentic/objective. This allows an artist/photographer to create a story and share an opinion that appears to based in evidence. That image can then shape the opinions of others. Getting to the core of what an image itself is is hard; all images aren’t photographs and they don’t all have to be two-dimensional. If I had to say one thing it would be that images usually depict or share something. Within the context of my work, images are a way I can frame, contextualize and share my visual experience.