Dostojewski and the winning World Press Photo

From NRC, february 10th 2007: ‘A good photo is like a beautiful sentence,’ says Spencer Platt, the American winner of World Press Photo 2006. He looks for literature in his pictures. ‘A photographer should make the world magic. Like you do when you read a book of Dostojewski.’

Dostojewski... the winning picture of Platt can indeed be read as a novel of Dostojewski. Only when you look longer at it, the story starts to unfold. Slowly you discover more layers... more stories come out of the picture. The stories of the people in the cabriolet making pictures of bombarded houses with their cellphones. The story of each separate person, and their relationships. And always wondering about Gods mysterious ways, I see the story is about me too, about all of us. In some way or another we all are part of the story. Very Dostojewski!

Practise thinking in pictures

Writing a poem is a way of thinking in pictures. So start writing poems!
If you never wrote a poem before, begin like this: choose three words that have a clear picture . Choose a thing, an animal and a color or a feeling. These three words form the basis for your poem. Take a paper and a pencil. Say the three words a few times aloud, and look in your mind at the thing, the animal and the color or feeling. Now you start writing down anything that comes up. This will bring about a connection between the thing, the animal and the color or feeling. The connection does not need to be logic. It may be nonsense. You can use the words several times if you want. Dive into the stream of sound, but make sure the three words stay clear pictures. You will notice that more pictures come up and that the pictures start streaming too.

Infinite variations

Do you believe that you cannot think in pictures, but want to learn: start reading poetry. The words in a poem evoke a lot of pictures. Not only the pictures of the writer, also your own! Poems can be seen, tasted and heard. You can jump in with all your senses.
To inspire you an English poem from the Dutch poet Leo Vroman, who lives in the USA.

A psalm for Albert Einstein

System! If You must surrender
to Your own lust for rolling dice
why does nothing You create
in the splendor of our Fate
ever happen twice?

No tottering glass can almost fall
and fall to break into the same
pieces twice – who can recall
one shard by a previous name?

No child is ever steered again
into the same last night
and none of us can claim the right
to live in vain.

If Thou throwst any dice at all
Thou must have shaped it like a ball
and feast upon its thunder
of infinite variations,

Thy bowling ball
all beasts and nations
must fall under.


This poem is a treat. Like good chocolat. Taste a piece and wait what happens. Infinite variations. I especially like the dice, shaped like a ball.

Visual literacy

‘Children should learn to ask questions about what they see. Teach them to interpret the pictures,’ was the conclusion of a symposium about children and picture culture, that was held in cooperation with the Fotomuseum at Rotterdam. When children are able to interpret visual information and the messages behind it, they can deal better with the enormous amount of pictures they have to digest every day. This trained way of looking is called visual literacy. With the exposition for children: IK KLIK, that was brought about in cooperation with children, the Fotomuseum wants to contribute to the development of children when dealing with the continuous flow of images that reaches them daily.

The exposition at the Nederlands Fotomuseum in Rotterdam can be visited until 3 december 2006

www.nederlandsfotomuseum.nl

A picture can be explained in different ways

What do you see at this picture?













• A Ufo landed accidentily on a nineteenth century building.
• This photo is manipulated; this cannot exist in the real world.
• The Royal Ontario Museum in Toronto. A new building constructed over the corner of an old building.

assessment for picturethinking

I found an assessment for picturethinking on the web. You only need to find out in what direction a person looks when he thinks about a question. A person looking upwards while thinking is supposed to be a visual thinker. A pity that this kind of nonsense spreads on the web.
Luckily there are scientists who speak out against it: Prof.Willem Levelt, professor in psycholinguistics at the Radboud University of Nijmegen, writes in an article in the magazine Intermediair of november 17, 1995 that there is no relation between direction of looking and the so called active representationsystems. You can find the article (in Dutch) at: www.skepsis.nl/nlp.html

Could Tyson be a picturethinker? To find out we start with the first step: we pose a question that will make him think...
'Tyson, what did you eat yesterday?'...







Tyson thinks it through...and yes, he looks upwards while thinking.
That means according to this assessment that Tyson is a picturethinker!

(If you can see a thought balloon on the picture, with a tasty bone in it, you are a picturethinker too!)

Pictures get meaning by naming them

It is often said that we are born as picturethinkers and learn the language later. That is not correct. First we learn to listen and with that comes language development. In the uterus we start learning our mother tongue by listening to the voice of our mother. Listening we need to learn to speak, wich is a matter of survival, because we need to learn to communicate as fast as possible.
Looking, visual thinking and using our imagination are things we start doing in our first year of life. When you lie in your craddle, you do not need it very much. Children who start crawling and walking, constantly name everything they see. That way they start seeing more. And learn more words. The next step is naming things that are not present, but can be seen in your thoughts.
Pictures get meaning by naming them. Pictures must be 'read'. Picturethinking is connected with language.