John Berger's Ways of Seeing begins with four words and then explains them. Seeing comes before words. The child looks and recognises before it can speak. The book appeared in 1972 alongside a BBC series, and that opening has outlived most of the arguments that follow it.
It sounds like philosophy and it is closer to a description of an ordinary Tuesday. You walk into a room and you have taken it in before you could name one thing in it. You know somebody is upset from across a café, before any of the reasons arrive. The naming comes second, and it comes so quickly afterwards that the order is easy to miss.
Psychologists have studied one narrow part of this and given it a name. The picture superiority effect describes the finding that people remember images more reliably than they remember words. Allan Paivio's account of it, published with Csapo in 1973, is that a picture gets encoded twice, once as an image and once as the language you would use to describe it, while a word is usually stored only one way. Later work by Brady and colleagues in 2008 found that visual long term memory holds an unexpectedly large amount of detail, not just the gist of what was seen.
The finding is often quoted as though it settled something larger, so the limits are worth saying out loud. The effect weakens if the image is only glanced at, and Fraisse showed as early as 1968 that longer looking makes the difference. It is weaker for abstract images than concrete ones, and it depends on how clear and how familiar the picture is. The researchers themselves are careful to say that images work alongside words rather than instead of them. What the evidence supports is modest and useful. Pictures are easier to retrieve later. It does not follow that an image is truer, or deeper, or more honest than a sentence.
The more interesting question is what an image does in the moment rather than in memory.
A sentence asks something of you. It wants to be followed, agreed with or argued against, and it arrives already sorted into a position. A photograph does not open that way. It arrives whole and the sorting happens afterwards, if it happens at all. Two people can stand in front of the same picture, come away with entirely different accounts of it, and neither of them has misread anything. There was nothing to misread. There was something to look at.
Berger's larger argument was that none of this looking is neutral. What we see is shaped by what we already know, what we have been taught to expect, and everything the image has been surrounded by before it reached us. The same photograph in a gallery, in a newspaper and in an advertisement is not the same photograph. He was writing about oil painting and television, and the point has only become easier to demonstrate since.
There is a plainer piece of evidence available to anyone, which is what people actually do with images. Photographs of the dead go on shelves. A picture of a child stays in a wallet through several changes of wallet. People hang things at the top of the stairs where they will be passed twice a day rather than in the room where guests sit. None of this is done out of a fear of forgetting what somebody looked like. The image is not being consulted for information. It is being kept where it will be met.
What an image seems to do, kept that way, is quieter than the claims usually made for it. It does not deliver a message on a schedule. It sits there, and now and then you look at it properly, and something in the day reorganises itself slightly around whatever it was you noticed. That is a small effect and it is also a real one, and it accumulates over years in a way that is very hard to measure and very easy to recognise.
This is the order Intention works in. The photograph is made first, and the Word of Intention comes out of it afterwards, once it is clear what the picture was holding. A word chosen in advance would need to go looking for an image to sit on, and the picture would end up illustrating an idea. A word that arrives out of a photograph carries some of the looking with it. Presence is one, set beside the photograph it came from.
Berger's child recognises before it can speak, and the assumption is usually that speech then takes over and the looking becomes a lesser, earlier stage. The order never really reverses. It just gets covered over by the speed of the naming, and it is still running underneath, doing most of the work, most of the time.
A quiet extension of this idea
Our pieces are built around this principle. A single word, placed so it naturally comes back into your attention during the day. Not something you have to focus on the whole day, just something that stays with you.
