A Picture Is Worth A Thousand Words: Richard Millington

Richard Millington asks if videos are better than thousands of stills...

It’s a distortion of an old Chinese proverb: a picture is worth a thousand words. Confucius actually said something like: “Hearing it a hundred times isn’t better than seeing it once,” but to be fair he didn’t have an iPhone or YouTube. The world has moved on and now it seems a video is worth a thousand stills.

I suppose as this column is the written word I should be arguing the power of imagination, the power of the pictures that a good writer can conjure in your mind’s eye. Of course this is true. I didn’t need to watch the Lord of the Rings films to know what Middle Earth looked like or to know how Sauron sounded. I already had the video in my head. However the ability to recreate these images from the written word, whether fantasy or fact, is a skill that not many possess.

For most of us, we resort to capturing the scene as opposed to describing it, with the help of digital photography. Where our words fail we can take a quick snap and the image is captured for eternity. But rarely does the picture we take live up to our reality. Often it will highlight the flaws of the scene. Add to this our own snap-happy setup, and actually all we have captured is a pale impression of the vibrant scene we hoped to immortalise. Maybe the issue is the lack of movement?