Graphics Reference
In-Depth Information
ingful connections between them. Every photograph will influence any others around
it, changing their individual meanings and contributing to a progression in narrative as a
result. For example, a viewer might see an image of a biker and a second image of a man
in a hospital bed and construct a story about a biking accident. Neither image repres-
ents this idea; the narrative occurs in the viewer's mind. Even concluding that the man
in the hospital bed is the same biker is an assumption the viewer creates. This distance
between what is shown in two images and what the viewer makes happen internally is
a kind of “semantic gap.” Substituting the hospital image for one that shows a biker at
the finish line of a race changes the narrative. The semantic gap is smaller and therefore
a more literal progression, but the gap exists because the viewer still assumes the two
bikers are the same person. As more images are juxtaposed or added in sequence, their
narrative reinforces itself based on the increasingly compounded assumptions initially
made by viewers. By the time viewers have seen three or four images in a sequence,
their capacity to avoid making assumptions decreases and they begin to look for mean-
ing that completes the narrative they have constructed. This “narrative momentum”
increases exponentially to the point that viewers will assume the semantic content of
any image appearing later in the sequence must be related to that delivered earlier, even
if details in the later image empirically contradict those of the first images.
In this comparison of two sequences beginning with the same base image, the narratives are wildly
different, but the narrative momentum of each concludes with assumptions that you, the viewer,
has made that aren't necessarily true. The rubble in the last image of the lower sequence is not,
empirically, that of the building shown earlier in the sequence. What assumptions have been made
about the information in the other sequence that cannot be proven true?
