Thinking Anthropologically about Media: Do Images Work Like Language?
by Johannes Merz

Thinking Anthropologically about Media: Do Images Work Like Language?
by Johannes MerzDo images work like language?  Do they have a vocabulary and a grammar that help us make sense of them? Many specialists would say that images are similar to language but that they are not the same.

Do images work like language?  Do they have a vocabulary and a grammar that help us make sense of them? Many specialists would say that images are similar to language but that they are not the same.

What about vocabulary? First of all, images and movies don’t have a vocabulary like language. Take for example the word tree. If you know English, you know what it means. But if you read the word utièbùe, you probably don’t know that this word means the same thing as 'tree'. Unless you know the words of a language and the conventions that go with it, you won’t be able to understand them.

To make sense of images, you don’t need to know words and their conventions. If you see a tree or an image of it, for example, it’s quite likely that you know what it is, at least if you have seen a tree before. You don’t need to know the word to know what it is, but you can find the word in your language once you think you’ve understood the image. So images are helpful for communication, as they don’t depend on a specific language. This, however, can give the false impression that people ’read’ images in the same or similar way all over the world.

Thinking anthropologically can help us realize that communication through images is not as straightforward as we sometimes assume. What a typical tree is and what it looks like depends on where you live. People who have spent most of their lives in an arid country, the arctic tundra, or a desert might find it hard to see trees in an image of a dense rainforest. Vice versa, an image of a lone large cactus in a desert might require some discussion among rainforest dwellers. The surroundings in which the tree appears are also important for recognizing it for what it is.

What about grammar? Again, we could say that images and movies don’t have a grammar. In English, for example, grammar tells you that the first person or thing in a sentence is always the actor and the verb that follows describes the action. Other languages have different grammars and structure a sentence differently. We also have rules about where to look first. When reading English, for example, we start at the top left corner of the page. When it comes to images, there is no defined structure and no system to guide your eyes across a picture. For example, you don’t always have to start looking at an image at the top left corner. Rather, our eyes tend to focus not only on the middle of an image but also on what moves or stands out to us in one way or another and what seems relevant. This will not always be the same for everyone. Image creation can influence this, for example, by arranging actors and objects in foregrounds and backgrounds, using camera movements and angles, or by blurring, or making the background duller. But there aren’t any grammatical or structural rules that prescribe the way we should look at images.

Making sense of images and movies is something we need to learn and is an ability that we usually acquire as children. In doing so, our social upbringing and cultural environments influence what we’ve been trained to notice first in an image and what becomes important. My upbringing means that I focus on individual people and may not always notice what happens in the background. But other people with a different social upbringing may pick up details in the background, since it’s more important for them to understand how people relate to each other and to their surroundings.

Depending on where we come from, we will not always see the same things when we look at images or watch a movie. While images and language work differently, drawing parallels between them is still helpful. It reminds us that, just as there are different languages, there are differences in how people understand images and movies. Can you figure out some of your ways of looking at and understanding images and movies?

Johannes Merz is a senior anthropology consultant with SIL International. He holds a PhD in anthropology and lectures at the Theological College of Northern Nigeria and at Moorlands College in the UK.  He and wife Sharon have been based in Benin, West Africa, since 2002.