Exercise
Over the space of a few weeks gather newspapers that you can cut up, preferably including a mixture of different political points of view. Have a look through and cut out some images without their captions. You could choose advertising images or news.
For each image, write three or four different captions that enable you to bend the image to different and conflicting points of view.
Selection Process
As this exercise is being carried out during the 2020 COVID lockdown, I have sourced my images from an online version of the The Times. To avoid any form of selection bias, I chose the first five images in the paper that contained scenes rather than a close up portrait of a person. I chose to select the image of Boris Johnson notwithstanding my criteria as I felt his expression was interesting.
Images
All images obtained from The Times newspaper. 6th May 2020. Copyright as shown in non-cropped images as shown at bottom of this post.
Fancy Dress Shop opens in local town
Armed Forces get closer to local community to help in COVID crisis
Armed Forces exploit empty retail spaces to reduce MODs need for barracks
British military man airport exits to enforce quarantine rules for new arrivals
New Irn Bru formula puts traditionalists in outrage
Search for Coronovirus vaccine continues
Scientists arrive in China to investigate virus source
Blood Plasma may be beneficial for COVID patients in critical care
Protective Equipment is in shortage even in laboratories
Toss and Spear the pancake, a new form of cooking
New home intruder self defence rules come into force today
Olympians face an extra year of games preparations, from home
Self inflicted injuries rise as public look for ways to ease lockdown boredom
Boris faces tough questions as he returns to press conferences
Boris looking tired after his new father duties keep him up all night
The weight of how to ease lockdown takes its toll on Boris
Boris reflects on the importance of getting Brexit done in the New Normal
Social distancing enforced by greenhouses in local restaurant
Climate change puts outside dining at risk
Concern over privacy as diners put on display
Learning
Some reflection on this exercise:
- One image showing something remotely connected to a theme can be repurposed to mean almost anything about that theme. The scientists in the lab is, in the newspaper, about the search for a COVID vaccine. But I came up with many different interpretations, still related to COVOID. This is down to the polysemic nature of the images but this observation shows how I could send a viewer in a certain direction even with a very tenuous link between the text and the image
- It was easy to invent humorous captions for the same images. Thinking of the same image, I really was struck by the fact that the liquid looks like Irn Bru. I felt like it was slightly wrong to make light of such a serious topic to the world at the moment but the learning is one can use text to completely change the interpretation of an image, this is going a lot further than my first observation where I was suggesting different interpretations, but still related to the same core subject.
- Text can close down an image if one is not careful. The fact that one can invent different captions emphasises the multiple interpretations possible, but this is the power of an image, one needs to be careful not to destroy that. Any one of my captions could cause the viewer to lock in on a certain view. For the image with greenhouses, I accidentally read the newspaper’s caption before trying to invent my own. I found that this made it a lot harder to think of other captions than it was for any of the others.
