They say that a photo speaks a thousand words. Is that true? You see the relationship between photographs and words has always been quite mysterious. What is the point of a photograph? We cannot express or think anything coherent about a photograph without formulating it in to words. But we may feel emotions from it right?

Take a look at this photograph and express something about it before you go on to read the next paragraph.

What did you express about it? Was it something about flowers nature in general? Was it something about beauty? Was it something about colors? Was it something about human nature? One man says these flowers represent the beauty of working hard and making a garden while another says they represent the beauty of stopping work and admiring what we have around us.

Anyone could have expressed almost anything in the world about this exact picture and it would be as true to them as anyone else’s opinion on it. Thus is the human condition: we see but we don’t know.

With a photograph as a medium alone and by itself we have chaos. A photograph tells us nothing. It symbolizes to us what we must create from it. With this photograph all we have is a picture of a garden of flowers. The photograph tells us nothing about gardens and their nature and the people who worked to make them and what all gardens share in common. Many might think life and happiness because it is a picture of flowers but what happens if I told you that I took the photo at a cemetery and those are the flowers around a grave? Than you might develop a different narrative and a different story about it. What you express from it might be the polar opposite of what you expressed when I told you nothing about it, but does it matter?

Without words the photograph means nothing, and that can tell us something about memory. Many will look at the photograph and say, “so what these are just a picture of some of the flowers that are cover the earth.” There is no meaning to it so therefore they will not notice how many flowers there are or which ones are in focus.

The person who took the photograph might recognize these as the flowers that his grandfather collapsed into as he was dying. They see the flowers and they really look at how many there are and recognize the foreground. They remember their grandfather and all he did and how he was always fussing with his garden and so forth.

The real story and narrative that surrounds the photograph is unknown to everyone except that of the maker. All everyone else can do is create lies around it. The photograph is what one makes of it, just as a painting is what one makes of it just as life is what one makes of it. It is impossible to know the truth of the photograph if the maker did not tell you. One can dissect all the pixels and pigments of color and say the photograph is made by the combination of pixels that make the color so there is no maker. But has one really learned anything truthful about the photograph by doing that?

I leave you with this poem by Robert Frost that I thought was rather funny:

… Why abandon a belief
Merely because it ceases to be true.
Cling to it long enough, and not a doubt
It will turn true again, for so it goes.
Most of the change we think we see in life
Is due to truths being in and out of favor.
As I sit here, and oftentimes, I wish
I could be monarch of a desert land
I could devote and dedicate forever
To the truths we keep coming back and back to.