An unknown writer sent me a photograph of himself.
I react badly to the whole machinery of sending a picture to a person. I always did. When we were encouraged to join a penfriends scheme as schoolchildren, I wondered what my photograph had to do with it ? I’ll never know. After all, you can look at a picture and think “Oh, no …” Well, I can. Because though I love writing and I love film – words and pictures, still or moving – writing for film is quite different from writing to read. The speech around producing a photograph may impact it. ( Let’s leave drawings and painting out of this.) Shot script is percolated through that magical, strange and various thing called a camera. And some of us are very influenced by sound – the taken for granted adjunct of the camera. And words can make a picture.
He quoted that old chestnut – a picture is worth a thousand words.
According to Google, widely attributed but not claimed. One of those thoughts open to infinite interpretation, I’d say “a good picture is worth a thousand words” but then it’s my “good” versus yours.
What is the image for? who takes it ? in what context ? for what reason ? Moving images are different again from still ones. Words you read are one thing, spoken they can be quite different. I still read aloud,
especially poetry, because an image moves me to, because I need to understand how the words fall. Several times I have heard people say how they were disappointed with how a favourite book was rendered into audio – “I didn’t like his voice” or “it just sounded wrong.”
The temporary dispenser in the chemist (I only saw him twice) had a particular intonation to his excellent English. Collecting a prescription, I asked “May I know where you’re from ?” He answered “Afghanistan”, adding with patient sadness “The land of blood and tears.” Six words that said a lot. No picture needed.
Which takes me to how we feel – whether you approach that as an individual thing or as a matter of consensus. Supposedly “everybody” loves babies. Based on the evidence of several recent stories of cruelty to children, that just isn’t true. You do and I may – but some other horror, man or woman, sees a child as the crucible of frustration, crying, needing
– and lashes out, again and again, reinforcing the habit of every kind of abuse. Judging by the RSPCA’s current appeals, not “everybody” loves animals – or is even disinterested enough to leave them alone. They starve, beat, humiliate and harm them. And when times constrict us, some of us lash out – physically or emotionally or both – and cruelties to the next accessible in the pecking order increase.
Reading about this or hearing account of it in news coverage is hard enough. Pictures are mostly unavailable or thought to be counterproductive. You don’t sympathise and reach for your change: you recoil, repelled and frightened.
When annalog began, I was asked why I wasn’t on Facebook, “you have so many friends.” The technology has changed not to say eroded how we meet people .
A friend in her forties said yesterday “My sister won’t think about social media but that’s how we meet people nowadays.” Not me.
Mine is the old way, face to face. I’ve made one or two wonderful friends and had encounters of joy – you know I have, because I often write about them. I can do what I can do, I have strengths and weaknesses. I prefer to see for myself, I don’t want images which have already incorporated a vocabulary of poses , thus rendering the image less representative of the person pictured and more to do with everybody else. Mass injections may be very useful, mass perceptions less so.
Yesterday I stood behind in a bus queue a tall slender girl wearing the most becoming shorts I have seen, all in the proportions. She was from Fiji. I was thrilled and said that I remembered Fijian warriors dancing to honour of the young Queen Elizabeth II. “I was not even born” she said, wide eyed. Time doesn’t change everything.
*the refrain of the Shoop Shoop song is “… it’s in his kiss.”
Annalog 