This is a great little presentation by Jessica Hagy (indexed) on the importance of captions: Loved your drawing of “This is not a pipe”! I about to publish an investigation about a fake history published in the The New Yorker and could use a smart cartoon(ist)? Please contact me if interested. I am going post this piece in our Media pics. The belly fat is a baby bump or it is not. The key to your examples is not the selective choice of facts, but a choice between captioning a truth or a lie, eg. He even made himself a ghost figure with a multiple exposure technique circa 1916-17. Go here to read more and see examples of Duchamp’s trick photography. Marcel Duchamp (some with Man Ray)did numerous altered photos using the standard set of photo tricks known since the beginning of photography. Thank you.Īt, we consider fake or distorted captions, staged subjects in scene and other undisclosed manipulations –in addition to photoshop–as all part and parcel of the same “fauxtography”. I also recommend taking a look at Derik Badman‘s article, “ Text In Comics.”įiled Under: Notes on writing and drawing Tagged: captions, lying, pictures + words, textĪustin, As a Marcel Duchamp scholar, (, ) AND a media ethics investigator, I really appreciated this post. I’d love to hear your own thoughts on the use of captions in the comments below. Take this hasty doodle:ĭepending on which captions I use, you’ll get a different picture of who I am, yes? In comics, it seems, the old creative writing adage “show don’t tell” is useless-you can certainly tell as much as you show, show what you tell, or tell what you show. For a cartoonist, it’s a potent weapon, which can take any drawing and turn it in many different ways. The power of captions can be used for good, or it can be used for evil. The moral of the story is that pictures can say whatever we want them to say, provided we use the right words. Many folks pointed to this picture as evidence of a Bristol Palin “baby bump”:Ī picture which would otherwise be an innocuous portrait of a nice-looking family is turned into a sinister conspiracy by the words, or caption, adjacent to it. The article is simply a list of photographs with captions-and the captions control how we read the photographs. If you read through this Daily Kos piece, the writer presents pictures of Palin at various stages of her pregnancy looking thin and trim as “evidence” that she wasn’t really pregnant with her fifth child, but it was her daughter, Bristol, who was pregnant. Captions do the heavy lifting as far as deception is concerned. “Chemical Munitions Bunker” is different from “Empty Warehouse” which is different from “International House of Pancakes.” The image remains the same but we see it differently.Ĭhange the yellow labels, change the caption and you change the meaning of the photographs. But I do know that the yellow captions influence how we see the pictures. I don’t know whether they were used for chemical weapons at one time, and then transformed into something relatively innocuous, in order to hide the reality of what was going on from weapons inspectors. I don’t know what these buildings were really used for. All you need to do is change the caption. You don’t need sophisticated digital photo-manipulation. If you want to trick someone with a photograph, there are lots of easy ways to do it. The documentary filmmaker Errol Morris had it nailed in his NYTimes article, “ Photography As A Weapon,” about photoshopping, forgeries, image processing, captions (and John Heartfield and King Geedorah!):ĭoctored photographs are the least of our worries. Yesterday, I was thinking about telling a story in pictures without words, and so today, in the aftermath of all the Sarah Palin pregnancy conspiracy theory madness, I started thinking about telling a story with words added to pictures.