Trevor Paglen's "One Hundred Pictures, Frozen in Time" & Errol Morris's "Liar, Liar, Pants on Fire" - Response

Starting off with Trevor Paglen's One Hundred Pictures, Frozen in Time, Paglen states about a discovery of cave paintings in the Lascaux cave in France during the 1940's, and presents his fascination of what's depicted in the paintings themselves. Whenever he look at the paintings, he goes back and forth on what's being depicted in them; he thinks it could be about a hunt, a ritual, relationship between human and nature, a murder confession, or a visual joke. There was a point Paglen though it might be an artwork made to be shown to those in the far future, to showcase what happen in the artist's timeline (or to think how early humanity would work in the future). Inspired by this concept, Paglen began a project called The Last Pictures, which is having communication satellites to be like "time capsule" filled with picture of his choice; the "time capsules" would then be left for those in the further future to look at the pictures - as if they were "cave paintings" (in context) - and have them learn about what happened to our Earth many years ago.

In Errol Morris's Liar, Liar, Pants on Fire, Morris provides his thoughts on how pictures are important, but can be meaningless if they don't have captions for them (even for old pictures). To be more specific, he states that one would be clueless of what are truly (going on) in the pictures, but one can guess on what/who they are; captions help broaden on what are in the pictures, but one would question if they're true. For example, in the article, there's an old picture of a ship, but by looking at it you can't tell what ship it is. With the caption stating that the ship is the "Lusitania", people will think the ship IS the "Lusitania", but other would think it's something else. The thing is, based on Morris' insight on his topic, context is needed for pictures to better understand what are in the pictures themselves; although, he does state that pictures can never have a "true" or "false" to them.

WJT Mitchell's "Word and Image" - Response

In Mitchell's "Word and Image" article, it states, at the beginning, that "words" are important by their meaning, not just by their "construct" of wording or how it sounds when pronounced; words can be considered as "objects of visual or aural attention". The same would go for images, but by what the images could represent; and we gain that knowledge through eyesight (or what philosopher George Berkeley of 1709 would state as the "visual language"). According to modern neuropsychologists like Oliver Sacks, they did confirm that the gaining of knowledge through eyesight is true when they found out that those who were temporary blind for a certain amount of time had to relearn the techniques of "seeing", even if the eyes fully recovered.

Based on what Mitchell described, many of literature scholars like Norman Bryson and Woody Steiner decided to enter the studies of art so they can provide their own ideology towards/on/in art, but art scholars like Thomas Crow didn't want the literature scholars to (I would per say) "change" art since the art scholars think that art is (and this is in context, just to say) in a different "league" than words. However, images can benefit from words to present meaning or what it represents (though it may vary). For example, Mitchell states (in context) that a word can alter even a simple image, like an image of what looks like an arrow to be presented (from a word) as a tree. Although, one would question on the specifics, like what kind of tree is the image. There are other cases that the image could represent something else.