“A picture is worth a thousand words.” I’d love to know the origin of that phrase. Implying that a single snap can speak for itself, that it is more valuable than a thousand words? That’s gotta be a Chinese proverb.
If you take the above adage too seriously though, you’ll be meddling. In the case of the image above, which shows a young Nicollette Sheridan sprawled upon a sofa with her then-boyfriend Leif Garrett, it is worth 509 words exactly. Or that’s what contemporary art journal (and n+1 offshoot) Paper Monument alleges anyway. In their re-occuring web column, See Something Say Something, they assign their writers a simple task: choose an image and write about it. The resulting product can anything. It be fiction. It can be an essay on photography theory and pop culture. Hell, it can be fiction disguised as gregarious rambling.
The column strikes me as very “contemporary.” In the end, what would contemporary writing be without Google Image Search, anyway? What would it be without hyperlinking to GIFs for the sake of humour (not to mention validity)? What would contemporary journalism be without the monumentous camera phone?
Contemporary life. **sigh**
What am I doing here? What am I doing here?
—-…Jessica Carroll is the Toronto Standard’s “Best Thing on the Internet Today” columnist. Follow her on Twitter at @jssckr.
For more, follow us on Twitter at @torontostandard, and subscribe to our newsletter.
