These photographs are amazing to me and what amazes me goes beyond the skill and efforts of the photographer or photographers who took them. What amazes me about them has to do with what I do and what NextStage does; determine how people will respond to the information presented.
One of the things NextStage trains its own staff and clients in is the ability to separate themselves from their environment, from their beliefs, from their own feelings because when you strip away all that is opinion what you have left is what causes the opinion. We label this as "What do you think happened? What happened to you? What really happened?" These three questions become an equation. Subtract any one from any other and what you have left is the third. This is learning levels of awareness and there is no end to it. The triangle becomes a regular tetrahedron and dimensionality increases as you learn to separate yourself further and further from what you started with.
This kind of training, applied to photographic analysis, causes you to ask "Did the photographer know what they were photographing?" (I know several photographers so will answer yes, they did), "Did they know they were they making a statement?" (maybe, not sure about this one) and "Was the statement intentional?" (meaning, they may have known they were making a statement, what statement did they mean to make?).
The key to the type of analysis I'm writing about actually has nothing to do with politics or Obama or Romney. It has to do with how cultural beliefs and training cause us to respond to information at the non-conscious level long before we're consciously aware of what the information is.
That offered, forget your conscious thoughts and opinions of the people in the images. Take a moment and let yourself be aware of what your deep conscious, your deep and forgotten memories and learnings and trainings, are communicating to you about the image, the information being presented.
Of the two, the Obama photograph is the more culturally mythic in western society. If the picture seems familiar to you on some level that you can't quite put your finger on, good work. The image is often repeated in art in the western world. If there was no other image the Obama camp could use to communicate what Obama's message is, they would go far with this one.
Likewise, the communication in the Romney picture is an old one but not so embedded in western society as the Obama photograph. The Romney image has only been around for maybe the last few hundred years. It is not as familiar an image and it is there never-the-less and if it makes you uncomfortable at some level, again, good work. This image could be used by those opposing Romney with no other context provided and people's opinions of Romney would go down. Not everyone's opinions, of course, just the majority's.
In both cases, the core reason people will go with the Obama image and not the Romney image is the same.
People create communities. People who are already in a community -- merely because they are already in a community -- are favored in our society. A man surrounded by others, reaching out and being reached for is a man who will be known by the people. A man alone is just that, a man alone. Push it just a little further and you have a man alone who prefers the company of machines to that of other people.
Excellent and telling photographs, these. Are they telling the truth, what the photographers believe is the truth or what the candidates want you to think is the truth?
Please contact NextStage for information regarding presentations and trainings on this and other topics.
Links for this post:
- NextStage's Predictive Echo Tool
- Political posts and pages
- Politics Aren't Horseraces Any More
- Predicting Election Outcomes via NextStage's TargetTrackTM
» This is a dangerous image from BizMediaScience
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Tracked on: February 17, 2007 12:00 PM | Permalink to Trackback