Digging Into Images
Every component of image contains the author's intention. Creators carefully place and arrange each person and item to deliver their thoughts. This means that we need to think about the meanings of position, arrangement, and combination in the image. Here are two black-and-white pictures of children. Each photograph can be interpreted in different meanings by their composition, but both of these can also make viewers feel sorrow.
In the first picture, two girls are placed in the center of the image. They are standing with bare feet in the middle of desert side by side. Dead woods behind them make the desert seem desolate. The looks in the girls' faces are hardened and depressed. They even look like glaring at someone in front of them. As the devastated background is posed behind the main characters, this image shows poor environments which could be home of two kids. It also delivers anger and agony of the girls to viewers.
Second picture captured the scene that two girls standing in front of the wall. They seem like they're outside on the street. Although they are not tidy and stand in their bare feet, the girls are giving a broad grin. The rough wall and street of the background and the children's small naked feet may describe inferior lifestyle of the kids. However, the photographer put smiling girls over that setting and made clear contrast between the circumstances and characters.
Most of the components in two photographs are quite similar. Both of the pictures took little girls with bare feet as main characters. All the children seem to be poor and have inferior living environment. Even though the backgrounds of pictures are not exactly same, but these all are pointing out girls' lives of poverty. The biggest difference between two pictures is the facial expressions of the children. The first one has frowning upset girls and emphasizes sorrow of their lives with them. On the other hand, the kids are smiling and look like happy children. This can be showed as the girls' still having hopes. But at the same time, contrast of the kids and background image can maximize agony of sad reality.
The two pictures have the characters, background images, and overall atmosphere in common. But second photo twisted the meanings and emotions from the image a little with smiling girls. The photographers have described the children who need help for the poor environments by combination and arrangement of each factor of the pictures. So thinking about the meaning of components and their positions would be helpful to understand the images better.
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