A picture..

The old Chinese proverb “A picture is worth a thousand words” has been one of the most influential sentences that I’ve learned while being an artist in photography. As a photographer, when your eye is behind the lens and your finger is on the shutter release, your mind is a tapestry of imagination and art. However, when it comes to taking a photo, you must first imagine the photo on someone’s wall.

Now take a step back from the wall, and pretend you aren’t the person who took the picture. You’re at a friend’s house walking around and are looking at pictures on the wall. When you’re standing back, what is the picture telling you? Is it making you sad? Is it making you happy? Is it stirring any emotion in your mind? If it isn’t, then it isn’t a real photo, it’s just a beautiful accident created by a camera. In order to take a good photo, you have to see the emotion in the lens, you have to create emotion from a single picture. This all is happening in your mind within milliseconds of your mind telling your index finger to push the button to record the image on your camera.

How does this all relate to our original topic of a picture being worth a thousand words? Well, the simple answer is that it’s emotion that creates all the words when your looking at a painting, a photo or any type of art that an artist has created. When we use emotion, we let the audience know exactly what words were on our mind when we were creating it. When doing this, it also translates to the audience upon viewing the artwork which emotions they feel.

Imagine looking at a Van Gough painting and feeling no emotion. You just stared at it and simply saw colors, which resembled shapes. If pictures didn’t describe a thousand words, this is what exactly would happen. Your mind is constantly telling you words when you look at a picture, which then creates the emotion. This is why indeed a picture does create a thousand words.