Illustration is an
art of visual communication. The combination of great artwork and
wisely chosen ideas is the formula for an illustrator's success in
communicating with pictures.
Pictures play a very
important part in our everyday life. Sight is our most widely used
sense and as a consequence of this, pictures play a significant
role in communication. A picture is neither subtle nor universal
enough to take the place of words in the strictest sense of the
meaning but that does not mean that pictures do not have their role
in communication, and many pictures do a superior job to
words under certain conditions. The underlying problem is that to
fulfil this condition, the pictures rely on the diversity of
language and words to secure their meaning.
Gombrich, in his book Art and Illusion highlighted the biggest
problem of communicating with pictures, and that is their
inaccuracy. His claim is that the artist is psychologically
susceptible to his own interpretation of the object he depicts. He
sees where the lines are to be drawn and he makes the object
conform to his own imagined stereotype. An artist learns a schemata
and a set of patterns when he learns to draw and these will always,
in the first instance, direct him to draw to those particular
patterns and classifications. As Gombrich says the `will-to- form'
is rather a `will-to-conform', and ensure that the assimilation of
any new shape conforms to the schemata and patterns an artist has
learned to handle. The truth is twisted to fit the stereotype and
the outcome not always the accurate representation of the object.
With this being the case, it is hard to argue that pictures can
accurately replace words. Words are specifically designed to convey
accurate descriptions and meanings, whereas pictures are subjective
and their accuracy is at the mercy of the interpreter.
Pictures are also only useful as a reminder of a frozen moment in
time. A photograph of someone, is very quickly out of date, whereas
language changes to suit time. A name can quite easily flash a
better and more accurate image of the subject in the recipients
mind, whereas a picture does no such thing. The importance of
language is that it is communicable. Naming someone provokes a
better image than an old photograph does and is just as
instantaneous. The key to language lies in its wonderful subtlety
and diversity. Picture communication can never say as much.
Language is designed specifically with the purpose of
communicating, whereas pictures are not. It is only because of
spoken and written words, that man has progressed. Speech can
be wonderfully diverse, but at the same time, its effectiveness
lies in its economical use. Through language we can form
relationships and communicate in other forms.
According to this argument, pictures came after language because
they needed vocabulary to find a purpose in
communication.
Thoughts without a language are not truly thoughts, because they
need language to define themselves. Helen Keller in her
autobiography, remarked upon this, when she first realised the
significance of language. When one day the word `water' was spelt
out in her hand, while at the same time a cool stream was gushing
over her other hand, the world of language was opened up to her.
"...Suddenly I felt a misty consciousness as of something forgotten
-a thrill of returning thought; and somehow the mystery of language
was revealed to me...That living word awakened my soul, gave it
light, hope, joy, set it free!...Everything had a name, and each
name gave birth to a new thought." It is easy to forget the
significance of language. Real thinking, is only possible when we
have the language there to convey it. `Water' for Helen Keller was
no longer just an object of sense perception, it had a name that
could be mentioned, conceived, remembered.
Pictures only offer confusion unless they are qualified by
language. To be able to communicate effectively the meaning of the
picture, you have to place it in context. Whether this be a phrase
on the picture saying; `danger', `vote Labour', or `support
Manchester United' or just putting the picture in the place or the
time, or next to the article that makes it relevant. We have
passport photos and not composed paragraphs because it is a better
form of communication under the circumstances. Pictures add sparkle
and colour to our life, but their use is entirely dependent on
language.
The joy and
necessity of language was wonderfully captured by Helen Keller, and
just as the world would be a more insipid place without pictures it
would be even more so without language. The creativity of words in
poetry, novels and public speaking is sometimes harder, and less
exciting, to reflect in pictures. Pictures have their
place, they can convey messages quicker and make life easier and
more exciting, but they are ultimately dependent on the social
conditions created through language.
The Greeks copied
the innovative Phoenician alphabet because pictograms and ideograms
were limited in what they could represent. It is said that their
famous historian, Herodotus, recorded a disastrous event that came
from misinterpreting pictograms. A general received a scroll with
pictures of a bird, a frog, and several arrows on it. The pictures
intrigued him, but he was too proud to admit that he couldn't
figure out what the message meant. He studied the scroll all night.
In the morning, the general told his officers that the scroll meant
the enemy was surrendering to them! The officers patted themselves
on the back and congratulated each other on their victory. However,
the poor, sleep-deprived general had made a deadly mistake. The
pictures meant that the enemy would attack them and that they
should prepare to surrender! The Greeks learned the lesson that
communicating with pictures was unreliable. They needed a better
system.
Cave paintings and
representational carvings define the beginnings of "external long-
term storage" of information. External storage has several
qualities of interest.
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It can be used by the individual as an
extension of "working memory" for immediate use in
thinking.
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It provides long term storage, for
retrieval at a later date.
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It can be used to communicate to other
individuals.
Before children
learn to read and write, they do not know the difference between a
line drawing and a letter. When an adult writes an 'A,' it is
simply another drawing. It is a picture, different than a face or a
house, but it is still just another image drawn with a colored
pencil on while paper. Soon children learn that combinations of
these letter- pictures mean more complicated things. When the
drawings 'A-P-P-L-E' are combined, they form another picture which
we learn stands for the name of the fruit. Now the letter- pictures
become word-pictures that can spark other images in our minds of
the thing they stand for. We further learn that these word-
pictures can be combined with other word-pictures to form
sentence-pictures. To a child, there is no difference between words
and pictures -- they are one and the same.
It is not clear how
much thinking skills are helped by early drawing, or how much
knowledge is conveyed. Communicating via pictures is potentially
powerful, but would have been labourious with early materials, and
not very portable. However, it seems likely that early drawing,
combined with the communications abilities refined through use of
speech, must have played a role in the development of early
pictorial written languages.
When you carefully
analyze a visual message, you consciously study each visual symbol
within that picture's frame. The act of concentration is a verbal
exercise. Without verbal translations of the signs within an image,
there is little chance of it being recalled in the future. The
picture is lost from your memory because you have learned nothing
from it. Images become real property of the mind and remembered
only when language expresses them. Linguistic experts do not need
to argue that images have no alphabet or syntax because such
assertions are true. The alphabet and the syntax of images reside
in the mind, not in the picture itself.
There are strong
indications that the status of images in mass communication is
increasing. We live in a mediated blitz of images. They fill our
newspapers, magazines, books, clothing, billboards, computer
monitors and television screens as never before in the history of
mass communications. We are becoming a visually mediated society.
For many, understanding of the world is being accomplished, not
through reading words, but by reading images. Philosopher Hanno
Hardt warns that the television culture is replacing words as the
important factor in social communication. Shortly, words will be
reserved for only bureaucratic transactions through business forms
and in books that will only be read by a few individuals. On the
human law of 'minimum effort', reading is losing ground to watching
because viewing requires little mental
processing.