November 20, 2006

During a lecture at Smith College last week, I was asked by a professor to offer my opinion about the diminished role of the written word in the age of the image. Implied in her query was something of a rebuke: As I explained the significance of the wealth of photographic evidence collected on September 11 (and how pictures would provide an indelible, historical baseline for generations to come), wasn't I giving short shrift to the depth and nuance of first-hand testimonies and reported accounts, to the abundance of insightful, considered analyses of the events and their aftermath that might help us get beyond the polarization and the bromides?

Why, in fact, was I placing more value on the visual than the verbal?

Clearly, I was over-emphasizing the importance of the photo. I have long believed that for certain events, in times of conflict, the photographic frame can be the most efficient and effective medium for distilling the essence of a historic moment, reducing its power to an irreducable two-dimensional space. And yet, in this age of 24/7 news, when TV anchors and pundits and government spokesmen have ample platforms available for spinning their takes on the message behind these pictures, it is the commentary--the context--that can matter as much as the image. Photos need captions. Moments need explanation. Otherwise, pictures become like music: we can color them with our subjective interpretations and associations, negating the salient facts that might be lurking in the very corners of the photographic frame.

The professor's point was that we should be careful not to downplay the significance of in-depth analysis and spirited debate to today's students, so many of whom are enamored of appearances, due to our modern-age fixation with Surfaces and Screens (supplied in spades by the camera, the Internet, the tabloids, the ticker-like "news crawls" scrolling at the bottom of our proliferating and ever-shrinking monitors). We must take the time to probe more deeply, to consider all sides, to question the Authorized Account. Otherwise, we are merely skimming, alighting, slumming--as the president did this weekend on his Vietnam visit (in a manner reminiscent of his 2005 "fly-over" above hurricane-ravaged New Orleans, conducted from the snug confines of Air Force One). Quoth Stephen Hadley, the administration's National Security Adviser, in yesterday's New York Times, in an article on George Bush's Speed Tour of Hanoi, largely conducted from the snug confines of his chauffeured car: "If you'd been part of the president's motorcade as we've shuttled back and forth [you would have seen that] the president has been doing a lot of waving and getting a lot of waving and smiles....I think he's gotten a real sense of the warmth of the Vietnamese people..." George Bush, as ever, Keeping It Real.

But then again... My predilections as a picture editor often hold sway over my instincts as a writer and word editor. And I find that I can passionately argue the case for the Image over the Word. In certain instances--especially in times of extreme violence, or in moments of unbridled joy--there is no substitute for the visual, the graphic, the eloquent silence of the image. For conveying the transcendence of the pure moment, a photo's dexterity is unsurpassed.

I'm reminded of A.O. Scott's comparison of visual-versus-verbal humor in the November 12 issue of The New York Times Magazine, in which he discusses James Agee's assessment of our current-day bias toward verbal humor in film. Writes Scott:

"[Agee] was arguing for the primacy of the gag over the joke, the visual over the verbal, a 'language' of gestures and camera placements over a language of double entrendres and stinging comebacks. It is striking, when you stop to think about it, how strongly the conventional wisdom, even among film critics, tends to run the other way: we are much more apt to repeat hilarious lines or savor witty repartee than to celebrate the pure, wordless, physical artistry of the boffo [moment, which reduces one to uncontrollable laughter]....Polite opinion likes it best when funny keeps company with smart. Humor that is mute -- or that deals with nothing more refined than the laws of gravity or the problems of digestion -- often seems dumb: either childish or, implicitly, lower class.

"To a democratic, humanistic sensibility like Agee's, however, those qualities are precisely what gave silent-screen comedy its universal appeal. The genius of a well-executed gag is that getting it requires neither schooling nor explanation....It overrides our sensibilities and sensitivities, our politics and our better judgment, disables our intellectual capacities and leaves us speechless."