They say, “a picture paints a thousand words”. According to Victor Burgin, a picture can also assist in conveying the message from a thousand words. This week’s reading, and excerpt from Burgin’s Thinking Photography, explains how images convey a message through symbolism. While this reading was a little dry, I found the overall message of it quite engaging. It’s crazy how much people actually rely on imagery to assist them in understanding what a long paragraph is trying to explain. Take the basic example of a newspaper. Most of us, if not all, have done it before. We’ve looked at the assisting picture and then skimmed the following article. While it is worrying how we’re becoming more and more dependent on this method, it’s interesting how quick we are able to understand the symbolism behind different images.

When we analyze an image, we try to understand the content, and the conceptual meaning based on the content. The image we analyzed in our lectorial this week was an advertisement from a GQ Magazine in 2014. The image consisted of a man in a blue shirt and board shorts throwing his son (who is wearing a white shirt and bather shorts) into a hotel resort pool. In groups, we discussed what the conceptual meaning of this image would be, deciding that it displays how the advertised attire maintains some formality whilst remaining comfortable enough for leisurely wearing. We even went a step further, and thought about the dominance of the colour blue. After a brief research, we found that blue represents trust and loyalty, which resonates with the son’s trust in his dad while he is thrown into the pool, (but we all had our doubts that that was completely intentional).