About a month ago, the New York Times ran a story about photo contact sheets. A contact sheet is a big piece of photographic paper with thumbnail images from a roll of film. Photo editors would use a small magnifying glass to see the pictures and select the images to use in the paper or magazine. They were once a staple of newsrooms. One of the images on which the Times focused was a famous picture of President Kennedy standing at a desk, leaning forward, hands flat in front of him. Like a lot of people, I grew up with that picture. It was an image of the leader of the free world, deep in thought, reflecting on the burdens of the office and the hard choices in front of him.
Except maybe it wasn’t.
Other images from the contact sheet make it clear he was reading. He was standing and leaning forward because his back hurt.
The story brought to mind the political communication theory of framing. Framing argues that descriptions of issues are always incomplete. The elements that are highlighted and hidden largely determine how people respond to the issue (is climate about future generations or current jobs, is the death penalty about heinous crimes or innocent people on death row). Rhetorical scholar Kenneth Burke used a camera metaphor when talking about his related concept of “terministic screens.” For Burke, language is necessarily a reflection, selection, and deflection of reality. He wrote, “I have particularly in mind some photographs I once saw. They were different photographs of the same objects, the difference being that they were made with different color filters. Here something so ‘factual’ as a photograph revealed notable distinctions in texture, and even form, spending upon which color filter was used for the documentary description of the event being recorded.” (from Language as Symbolic Action).
Contact sheets are reminders that pictures don’t tell stories, we tell stories about pictures. We then react to the story, not to the complete subject in the picture. We feel the weight on Kennedy's shoulders, not the pinch in his back. Before telling, and acting on, a story about an image it’s worth asking what we might be missing, what the filter highlights or hides, how the picture would look if taken from a different angle, or what is just outside of the frame.