The way that climate change is pictured matters politically.
Often we have a ‘gut’ sense that images matter, we are aware of ‘thinking in images’ and we know the saying about images being worth a thousand words.
The pages above seek to unpack how images matter. Below, a few quotes from commentators and researchers offer some insights on these issues:
Imagery and political communication
Political communication scholar Dan Schill writes that images
play a foundational role in the political communication process… Not only are we now campaigning largely by pictures—we are also governing by pictures, and these televised images create the political culture from which we debate candidates and policies’ (2012, p. 133).
A key image from the civil rights movement
Civil Rights movement historian David Garrow writes about a photograph of a police dog lunging at high school student Walter Gadsden as ‘perhaps the best remembered and most commented upon visual image of the movement’s efforts in the first half of the 1960s’. The photograph is commemorated in the sculpture pictured opposite.
In a 2012 dialogue about climate change communication, documentary filmmaker Jon Else comments on the same image in relation to climate change, contrasting the climate movement with previous movements:
And I think one of the problems with climate change [is that] no ever succeeded in tying that to a dog going after a demonstrator and fire hoses in Birmingham, Alabama… There’s few images in An Inconvenient Truth, in the Al Gore film, the glaciers are very powerful. But there’s nothing that’s quite as hot imagistically as what we’ve seen in previous movements, the anti-apartheid movement.
The power of images
Professor of Science and Technology Studies at Harvard, Sheila Jasanoff, argues that
The power of words to compel action has been a subject for philosophical and political analysis from Plato down to modern times. The power of images may be no less profound, especially in our era of mass visual communication, but it has yet to receive the same sustained scrutiny.
Jasanoff examines the example of the image of the earth hanging in space (see opposite) and ‘the complex pathways’ by which it ‘has come to inhabit our political consciousness as an icon of global environmentalism’. Although she notes that there is no linear link between the image and shifts in environmental consciousness, she writes that the image:
- made environmental concerns ‘visible and immediate’
- is ‘deeply political’
- has provided a ‘visual anchor’ for a new ethic of sustainability
- may have helped to shift perceptions of environmental risk from a local focus to longer-term concerns about human survival.
Worth “a thousand words”???
The old adage claims that a picture is worth a thousand words. Donald Davidson challenges this idea in an article on metaphor, writing: ’a picture is not worth a thousand words, or any other number. Words are the wrong currency to exchange for a picture’. We can describe or ‘translate’ what we see in an image in the form of words or propositions, however Davidson argues that ‘there is no clear end [to what a] metaphor makes us notice…what we notice or see is not, in general, propositional in character’.
He’s pointing to the way that images can convey something deeper and more fundamental than words.
‘If I can see it, I can understand it better’
John Paul Lederach offers additional perspectives, derived from his experience at the sharp end of peacebuilding and conflict resolution around the world. Lederach emphasises the place of art and imagery in achieving social change. Rather than resulting from cognitive analysis, he argues, transformative moments often arise through sudden insight that comes ’in the form of an image’.
He reflects that in informal settings, people rarely talk about conflict analytically. Instead, they ‘talk in images’. Seeing the essence of an issue, he continues, is the hardest challenge of peacebuilding: ‘If you do nothing else, take time to get a picture, an image… When you see the picture better, you will have achieved a synthesis… What I find is this: If I can see it, I can understand it better’.
