A picture is worth a thousand words – said somebody once. Whoever they were, they were wrong.
Words and images tap into different parts of our brain and they inspire us in different ways. There isn’t a constant that we can multiply one by to get the other. That’s why we need both when we want to get the message across to as many people as possible that nature is amazing, it’s under threat and we can save it.
There are photos that can move and inspire us in ways that several pages of text can’t (and vice versa but that’s a different blog). Just ask any advertising exec. And as a general rule I find advertising execs are good people to ask because unlike artists and poets they have to translate their work into hard sales or they get fired pretty quick. In a previous life as an entertainments journalist I asked lots of amazing artists for insights into their work and the impact it had on their audience - frustratingly they often had very little clue.
If I were to boil my job down into four words it would probably be, effective words and pictures. Like the advertising exec, I need to know that the images and the words we use are having an impact.
Here in the Trust’s communications team we produce a beautiful magazine (really, a lot of work goes into it by some very talented people – it’s pretty special), and we also create social media content, leaflets, posters, interpretation boards, webpages, newsletters, reports, Netflix documentaries (OK I may have lied about that one) and whatever else we need to get our message across to our audience. Photos take up most of the space in these communications, they are the first thing that people will see and they are probably the things that will stick with people the longest.