Lack of Passion and Respect for the Craft Is Its Purveyor’s Greatest Sin
In recent weeks we have been exploring various topics and examples regarding the understanding and effectiveness of visual storytelling.
Recent posts, through my analysis of websites and mood boards (Websites are People Too); through my analysis of graphical pie charts to creatively express data (Visualization Matters); and through my studied creation of an infographic (The Capital Grid Electric Modernization Project) have all contributed to our shared design, theoretical, and academic understandings.
We should not unduly get bogged down, however, in the analysis of design or its theoretical underpinnings when we instructively pivot now to consider visual storytelling’s greatest sin.
My thesis here then, is this:
To expand:
I submit that a lack of passion, truth, and respect for the visual storytelling craft will cause individuals and institutions to have a tendency to manipulate photos.
Of course, competitive pressures are almost always in play in all of this.
These three photos are among a plethora of photos that suggest the manipulation that occurs within the advertising, modeling, marketing, and other industries.
I submit that a lack of passion, truth, and respect for the visual storytelling craft will also cause individuals and institutions to have a tendency to forget some of the best ideals and principles of visual storytelling. Principles like authenticity, truth, and ethics.
Jade Lien in her article The 4 Principles of Visual Storytelling confirms that principles like authenticity and reality rules. Ms. Lien rightfully reminds us that advertisers should not be disingenuous – audiences have a good sense of when advertisers have staged a photo, it is overly polished, or it just doesn’t feel real.
RECOGNIZE ANY OF THESE DISINGENUOUS BEASTS WITHIN THE HUMAN ZOO?
Pictured “Right-to-left” In The Graphic Below — Trying to get the “lions share” some advertisers and marketers may think they need to cleverly bully designers into untruthful visual storytelling practices like Adobe photoshopping items to portray their advertising wares in the best light.
If that doesn’t work, these advertisers and marketers may come off as “sweet as a puppy”. Maybe they don’t need to bully that much at all and the Adobe “photo shoppers” pretty much just go along.
Not all, or even most, but some people in the industry may change their stripes (and that of their manipulated models, food products, or subjects, to maximize profits.
Some folks will look you dead in your eye and can approach ethics casually but be as quick as a gazelle to dodge image liability issues.
Some visual story-telling reporters or digital advertiser sinners may not have a beef with you …. unless you question their dispassionate, unethical, sensationalistic, or questionable practices!
Finally, I submit that a lack of passion, truth, and respect for the visual storytelling craft will cause individuals and institutions to use misleading statistics and put forth “fake facts”.
MISLEADING STATISTICS IN ADVERTISING . . . JUST THE FACTS!
The Colgate toothpaste advertisement below in the U.K. is an example of advertisers pushing misleading statistics. The 2007 ad claimed that “More than 80% of Dentists recommend Colgate.”
According to the Advertising Standards Authority (ASA) of the U.K., another competitor’s brand was recommended almost as much as the Colgate brand by the dentists surveyed. The ASA ultimately concluded that faulty polling and outright bias were at play here.
SOME CONCLUDING THOUGHTS
As bad as storytelling’s greatest sin, lack of passion and respect for the craft and truth is, the reverse of this faulty approach is also true.
If there is proper passion and respect for the craft of visual storytelling, advertisers and indeed individual visual storytellers can enjoy commercial success by doing things the right way.
One such individual who did things the right way is one Gordon Roger Alexander Buchanan Parks. Gordon Parks was a black man who grew up relatively poor, one of 15 children in Fort Scott, Kansas.
A self-taught photographer this celebrated creative, filmmaker, and visual storyteller rose up to be the first black photographer at Vogue and Life magazines, and the first black filmmaker to have a film, Shaft, be produced by a major studio.
Did Mr. Parks seem to receive divine favor? Yes! . . . Did he have immense talent? Absolutely!
But ultimately, an inward stick-to-it-ness, a crazy drive, and an insatiable passion for his craft and the truth were key in sustaining Mr. Park’s career despite racial, competitive, and other pressures that he faced!
More on Gordan Parks later, via an upcoming research paper which I will soon post. Stay tuned!
References
Biography.com Editors. (2020, July 9). Gordon Parks. Biography.com. https://www.biography.com/artist/gordon-parks.
Lebied, M. (2020, July 15). Misleading Statistics & Data – News Examples For Misuse of Statistics. datapine. https://www.datapine.com/blog/misleading-statistics-and-data/.
Lien, J. (2020, December 8). Worth 1,000 words: The 4 principles of visual storytelling. amplifi. https://amplifinp.com/blog/4-principles-visual-storytelling/.
