Pictures Speak

A picture does not move, does not talk, but it’s still conveying a loud message.  The popular saying “a picture says a thousand words” is used over and over again. It may be confusing because we all know pictures don’t really talk but the saying has a deeper meaning behind it. When you see a picture the first thoughts that come to your mind are just your initial observations but you don’t really grasp the entire image until you look for a while longer. Even the small aspects of a photo are important in telling the whole story. When first looking at this picture I see it’s black and white but when I look longer I realize that the picture is from many years ago. When diving into understanding a picture you should start with just what you see and go from there.   In Citizen by Claudia Rankine she uses pictures and blank space to convey just as loud a message that she conveys with her words. Looking at the picture below used on page 91 the first thing you probably think is it’s just an old picture of a group of people

When you observe the picture for a while you begin to notice more and more about it.

I wrote out everything I saw in the picture. It doesn’t matter if what you notice is something small because it all goes together to tell the bigger story of the image. When you look at the picture more you noticed peoples relaxed facial expressions and all aged people moving around the trees. I also noticed how it looks like the picture is missing something.  I looked up online the origins of the picture to learn more about it. I learned that the picture Claudia Rankine used in Citizen is actually an edited picture. The original picture features two African-American men hanging from the trees. The original photo taken in 1930 shows a lynching at the time segregation and racism was prevalent throughout America.  In Citizen it says “The past is a life sentence, a blunt instrument aimed at tomorrow.” You can never go back and change what happened in the past, but you should learn from it and let it affect your future. Another picture used in citizen to communicate without words, kind of uses words. The picture below on pages 52-53 of Citizen shows repeated words getting blurrier and more smudged the more you move down the page. 

When first looking at this picture I was confused because I din’t know how repeating phrase ” I DO NOT ALWAYS FEEL COLORED” and “I FEEL THE MOST COLORED WHEN I AM THROWN AGAINST A SHARP WHITE BACKGROUND.” I again wrote down all of the things that I began to notice, the obvious stuff and the stuff that took me longer to notice.

The farther down you read in the picture the more blurred the words get.  I interpreted that as the more people try to fight the stereotypes the harder it is to navigate for them. Race is such a hard topic to talk about and a lot of people don’t like talking about it. I Interpreted the picture as an art piece to represent the difficulty of discussing race.