(so remember) Every picture tells a story, don’t it?

The blogging community is a supportive, creative and a largely virtual community. As such, members not only post their own blogs, but avidly follow and read fellow bloggers’ posts. For me this week was no exception. One of my fellow bloggers is Lynn Findlay @lm_findlay . She runs a bit, writes a bit and last week posted a blog that explored the growing use of instant images on social media and the possible implications for privacy and behaviour. It’s a great little blog and one of the things that I found fascinating was Lynn’s example of contrasting the reader’s reactions and feeling to both the use of images or the use of simple text to capture the moment and/or inform. You can read it here. 

I think Lynn is on to something. One has only to look at the proliferation of Christmas appeals we are now seeing on our TVs. Whether the appeal is to help provide clean water, provide warmth and a place to stay for the homeless, rescue donkeys, cats and other assorted animals, what they all have in common are the use of images that seek to evoke an emotional response. And of course, following that emotional response, to donate to the charity. 

I have always used a lot of images in my work. As an academic, my classroom presentations were predominately made up of images that I used as a framework for delivering my lectures (and every presentation contained at least one chicken picture); likewise, presenting papers at conferences would always involve carefully selecting images to illustrate the points I wanted to make. 

My long-term co-writer Professor Sue McAndrew shares my passion for surreal images and we have spent many a long hour searching for images to illustrate our work. Our belief has been that pictures often tell the story more powerfully, or at the very least, capture and keep the attention of others. Over the years, we have received some great feedback about our presentations and the images we have used.  I really pleased that after some 120 peer reviewed conference presentations made all over the world (and that is a lot of images) we have never had a complaint that they have caused offence. However, many people have told us of the other powerful emotions they experienced by some of the images seen.

     

And I had one of those moments last week. 

I was just going through my Twitter timeline, when I came across a picture posted by one of my Twitter friends. It showed a picture of a sculpture in Geneva. The sculpture was created by the Romanian artist Albert György, who now lives in Switzerland. It can be found in a small park on the Quai du Mont Blanc promenade, situated along the shores of Lake Geneva. He called the piece ‘Melancolie’ reflecting the isolation and sadness he felt after his first wife had died. It is a beautiful and evocative piece. 

Interestingly, the Twitter post had the sculpture named as ‘Emptiness’. This seems to have come from one of the many comments posted by people who had seen it and had experienced loss, particularly of a child. It is a recurring theme in many of the comments that have been posted. You can find some of these here. I found many of the comments heart-breaking in describing the context of the loss experienced, but all were powerfully demonstrating the power of love. I am not surprised to learn that the image has been seen over 23 million times since being shared on social media. Over the past few days, my Twitter timeline was packed with comments around the image – and that doesn’t always happen with many images.

The title of this week’s blog comes from the 1971 album of the same name. This was a breakthrough album for Rod Stewart. Like all good art, the songs have endured and been loved by generations over the last 47 years. In its own way, many of the songs are as poignant and evocative as Albert György’s sculpture. These are songs that talk of forgiveness (Amazing Grace), first love found, and love lost (Maggie May), of living for today (Tomorrow’s a long time), loss (I know I’m losing you) and faith (Reason to believe). If you have not heard this album in a while, find 40 mins today, sit back and have a listen.  What you might not know, unless you were around in the 1970s, is that on the original album notes, the names of two alcoholic drinks (Martell Brandy and Mateus Rose) are slipped in and listed as contributing personnel on the album.