The Power of Photograph

A report of BBC news entitled “Picture power: Tim Hetherington” which reporting the British photographer Tim Hetherington talks about his photograph of a US soldier in Afghanistan which has won the 2007 World Press Photo Award.

Nowadays, it is not surprised to find a couple of enlarged color pictures on the cover of their daily newspaper – as well as inside the middle-pages. In fact, readers would probably do not like a serious newspaper that doesn’t bother with graphic incentives and catchy visuals.

Kress and Leeuwen (1996) have pointed out that in today’s world we are moving towards a decade that has a decrease control of language in the public media and increase importance in visual communication.

As Walsh (2006, p.29) clarify’s that audience are inclining towards favouring text that has features of multimodality, the use of photos to increase a story’s effectiveness and quality are on a rise. The use of visuals fulfills a ‘prosodic’ role of highlighting important points and emphasizing structural connections complementing the meaning of text (Kress and van Leeuwen 1998, p.187).

By using images, we would be able to command attention from target audiences through salience– the elements of a layout attract the reader’s attention to different degrees, and through a wide variety of means: placement in the foreground or background, relative size, contrast in tonal value or color, differences in sharpness and so on (Kress and van Leeuwen 1998, p. 188).

Look at the pictures below. You do not only know the truth from the picture, but you are also feeling how they felt. A picture tells a truth but also provide feeling and impact at the sametime. Compared to texts, the expressions loaded on the subject's face.







































(Source: news.bbc.co.uk)

Moving to a digital world, a picture does play a huge role. Imagine yourself reading a book with full of text and words that has the minimum space for you to breathe in, do you sometimes desire for a picture, or maybe an illustration to refresh your mind?

References:

Kress, G & van Leeuwen, T 1996, ‘Chapter 1: The semiotic landscape: language and visual communication’, Reading images: the grammar of visual design, pp 15-42, Routledge, NY.

Kress, G & van Leeuwen, T 1998, ‘Chapter 7: Front pages: (the critical) analysis of newspaper layout’, Approaches to media discourse, pp. 186-219.

‘Picture power: Tim Hetherington 2008’, BBC News, viewed 13 June 2009,
http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/south_asia/7240590.stm

Walsh, M 2006, ‘The ‘textual shift’: examining the reading process with print, visual and multimodal texts’, The Australian Journal of Language and Literacy, vol 29, no. 1, pp. 24-37.