A colleague once told me that while it may be true a picture is worth a thousand words, a bad picture causes a million questions. This and my exploration of story-telling through imagery, namely photography, and creative writing, with a mixture of essays — mostly about photography — and fiction has led me upon more than one occasion to ponder this relationship between imagery and words. Is one better than the other to tell a story?

It’s easy to see — and I love this — that imagery can often convey appearance and meaning far more efficiently than words could. Think of what one would have to say or write to describe this scene.

Or this one.

Granting these examples prove the “picture is worth a thousand words” principle, one should also note that words can effectively draw an image. Take for instance the next two quotes from my short story, Emergence. Think of what it would take in a movie sequence or even in a single image to portray what one or two sentences get across.

“Small flames formed at the forward tip of the pod, reaching upward and growing like yellow-orange fingers until they engulfed it.”

“Around them thin green and red beams flashed upward. Several of them connected with other pods, and they fell in bursts of flame onto mounds of gray rubble.”

I suppose we could still maintain that imagery would be superior in conveying these illustrations, but we should also admit that it is not strictly necessary or in fact more efficient to do so via visual means. Word pictures, when we draw them well, can tell the story just as effectively. And, unlike the straight up visual portrayal, the “use your words” approach engages the imagination of the observer and reader, whereas an image, to paraphrase the cliché, chews and swallows the scene for us, without much need to imagine.
There is one area, though, where imagery can’t compete and words stand alone. To illustrate, take a look at this next photo.

On the one hand, it would take quite a bit of description to tell the scene. For instance, “Peter watched on as a solitary woman, head hung low, strode across the sweeping space before the Dome of the Rock shrine. Above, the rays of the sun pierced through breaking clouds onto the golden dome and blue tile façade underneath it.” Okay, so one could do a lot better, but you get the point. Forty-two words into it, and I’m not even scratching the surface.

Speaking of the surface, however, suppose now I were to focus exclusively on that lone woman. Suppose I wanted to tell the story of her inner turmoil, the reason her head hangs low. How would I do that in a single image, or even in a sequence of images, or even through movie footage? Voice-over? Yuk. Yet, if I were to write this scene from her perspective and with a very tight personal point of view, perhaps in the span of a 100 word paragraph I could let the viewer-reader what is going through her mind as she walks across that “sweeping space,” where as an image will simply have to remain silent on the topic.

Sum it all up, and while I still love the way visual media, among which I count photography as my favorite, conveys a scene or even a feeling, I must also love the way words can get deeper and closer to the core of human emotion and thought than imagery ever could. Story-tell as you would, but the power for the word and word pictures remains.