Photo experiment

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I asked another group of people to tell me a story from my four images this time. Trying to explain this task to people has been more difficult than expected. It's quite funny to see what people come up with, some got quite excited about making up a story which didn't help me.

By adding the image of the man busking the stories people have came up with hasn't completely helped. I asked people ageing from 20 to 42, both male and female.

Street musician was paid £10 for a guitar playing ape, which unfortunately looked like a duck. Female, 42 , mental health nurse

This was because the woman doing this task thought the image of the duck was an ape!?! I could kind of see it by the end. After a struggle of squinting the eyes.

An illegal immigrant smuggled his duck into Scotland, which he then sold for a guitar. With the guitar he busked and earned £10 which he then bought the duck back. However whilst busking his duck was stolen by a hungry chinese man.

male, 20, footballer

Australian singing on the guitar to make money and buy a duck.

female, 20, career

This story is correct and was what I wanted to get. Even though I only got one person to to get my target story, I was still glad it worked. I found it difficult to make people say what I wanted them to say. I could clearly see the story but obviously others didn't. After this I decided to add text to the first three images and put them in order to see if it works. Having the image of the guitar first then the £10 and finally the duck with the word 'purchase' on it. After doing this the majority of people came up with the target story in some way or another.

From doing this I can relate to the essay by Roland Barthes 'Rhetoric of the image'. I understand how people can read images in such different ways. How their views and past experiences can change the image of an image. It interests me how you can read images from a different way from the three messages the linguistic message that is set what the image is saying or how knowing knowledge of the image can make you know the correct information, or the image alone. Trying to make people read a story from a group of images has been a surprisingly difficult experience but has shown me that manipulating an image really help people to read the same.