In defense of words

I have a bone to pick with pictures, so listen up images because I'm coming for you. You think you're so high and mighty, think you're the only way for people to really understand anything. "A picture is worth a thousand words," right? Wrong, and this is why. First off, what use is a picture to a blind person? I have the answer to that too, a picture is useless to a blind person. Useless, as in has no use, cannot be used. My second argument, which I think applies more broadly than the blind man scenario, is that all a picture shows is what is happening at that one moment in time. Pictures give no background or explanation, and also lack the courtesy to tell the viewer what happens next. Let's look at this one.

You are probably familiar with this picture. As you know, the guy on the right is Jack Ruby, the guy in the middle is Lee Harvey Oswald, and the guy with the hat and the bewildered expression on the left is J.R. Leavelle. Oswald had just recently assassinated the President of the United States of America, Mr. John F. Kennedy, in Dallas Texas. He was being transferred from the Dallas Police Headquarters to the county jail when Ruby surprised everyone by killing him. Some people think that Ruby and Oswald and whoever else were involved in various conspiracies that resulted in the murder of JFK, but everyone agrees that Oswald was killed by Ruby and point to this picture for proof. 

Now, what have we learned? From this picture we can tell that one guy is shooting another guy in the chest, and that the guy handcuffed to the target appears very surprised that this is happening. That is all we have learned from the picture. We can try to assume things and infer other things from the picture, but other than what we see we have no way of knowing why, when, where, or even how the event in the picture took place. All we know is what we see. I'll grant that pictures can convey emotions, events, and whatnot far more concisely and tidily than words, but without words that is all they are, pretty but inexplicable images.