Words about Pictures by Nodelman Perry;

Author:Nodelman, Perry;
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: University of Georgia Press
Published: 1988-08-15T00:00:00+00:00

If a picture can, by means of various conventions, convey motion and the passage of time (or startle us with the apparent lack of those qualities), then it can, obviously, also suggest the organized events of a story—the interconnectedness of cause and effect that makes up a plot. It can do so because its evocation of motion and time’s passage suggests cause-and-effect relationships among the objects it depicts. In Rosie’s Walk we understand that the motion implied by Rosie’s right-facing image causes the fox to follow her; in Arrow to the Sun the arrow shape that tells us the boy is flying toward the sun also suggests a cause-and-effect relationship between the boy and the bow. Furthermore, many of the various narrative implications of size, space, color, and so on that I discussed earlier depend on the way in which they evoke cause-and-effect relationships; to give just one obvious example, the shadows of characters that overlap the figures of other characters imply how those characters affect each other.

Even a picture of a set of visual objects that have no apparent temporal relationship with each other may evoke a story—as long as we assume that the figures we see in it are effects of causes not shown in the picture. For instance, even though the picture of Peter Rabbit’s mother walking down the path shows only her holding her basket and walking through the forest, the details are interesting enough that even a viewer who looks at this picture divorced from its context in the book is likely to ask questions about them that evoke a past and a future and thus demand a narrative. What caused this rabbit to be clothed, and in this particular clothing? What led her to be carrying a basket and an umbrella? Where is she going to or from? Where does the path we see her on lead to?

Knowledge of the usual connections between similar objects and people in real life may help us to answer such questions, as can knowledge of the conventions that make pictures meaningful. Mrs. Rabbit’s umbrella suggests that she has considered the possibility of rain, and the vague outlines and weak colors of the background behind her force us to acknowledge her sharply outlined and brightly colored figure as the central focus and most potentially meaningful element in the picture. The same factors particularly influence the cause-and-effect relationships we read into a picture that more clearly implies movement. As I said before, our knowing that rabbits do not usually jump up into sieves helps us to interpret the picture of Peter Rabbit and the sieve. We will also realize that pictorial gravity makes objects near the tops of pictures usually move down onto the objects beneath them, so we will assume that the sieve is moving down onto Peter, not that Peter is jumping up at the sieve. In picture books, of course, we also base such guesses on what we know about the story so far; even before we

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