Does a picture say the right thousand words?

Time to spout an old cliché. If you have heard it once you have heard it a thousand times. An image really does say a thousand words.

There is though a problem with this cliché. If I were to show the image above - which shows the River Severn on its way to freezing in central Worcester for the first time in at least 30 years - to a group of people it would undoubtedly say different things to each of them.

Imagine the group contained Jill, the archetypal climate change activist, and Jeremy, a supercar-driving climate change skeptic. (Jeremy's personality and name, you understand, lends nothing to any famous climate change skeptics you may be thinking of)

Jill, through daisy-woven dreadlocks and a haze of scented candle smoke, might stare tearfully at the image before reaching to her guitar and improvising a ditty lamenting the rarity of true winters in our warming world.

Jeremy, meanwhile, would scoff. Ice, he might add, boastfully, as if stumbling upon a profound yet original thought, only forms when it is cold! When Peter took this image it was minus ten every night for a week! How can the world be warming, ridiculous?!?

Our prejudices inform how we interpret images. A two million year old South African hominid would look at an image of an eagle with fear. Eagles, after all, preyed upon their children.

If we fast forward to the 13th Century, the eagle has become the king of birds, fear has been transformed to reverence. Eagles are able to rejuvenate themselves by flying directly into the sun before rising, phoenix-like, from the flames.

Now eagles are pests or conservation symbols, a product of evolution or one of god's mightiest creations. Viewpoint is everything.

This eagle though is not wild, and neither was the one in the previous photograph. He is owned and flown daily by a man who cares deeply for it. Suddenly, just with a few words, the eagle has become a beloved pet or a cruelly-held captive animal.

Whereas, though, most dog walkers simply walk, feed, care for, and love their pets, this eagle has a further purpose. The owner hunts with the eagle, flying it at wild hares. Sometimes it kills, sometimes it does not.

Now, to some people, the eagle is the sinister tool of a bloodsport; to others it is a rare opportunity to view a predator in action at close quarters; to yet more it is a pest control agent. Again, this has changed all with the application of just a few more words.

Where then does this leave conservation photography and natural history film-making if people tend to see their own prejudices in images and film? How do we know if the thousand words an image says are the ones we mean it to? Are conservation and educational images redundant, powerless to change people's perceptions?

Not at all, far from it. A carefully chosen image, a skillfully applied sentence, or (on film) a well chosen soundtrack, can bypass prejudice and bring out new emotions, making people laugh and cry on cue, sharing the emotions of the artist.

The challenge is to understand the perceptions of others and to chose those images, words, and sounds that affect your target audience in the same way they affect you, getting your message across as strongly as possible. The only real way to test this though is to show someone the final product and to ask them to explain, in a thousand words, what it means to them.

Note: The proof is in the pudding. Straight after this post I logged onto facebook, finding a link to this article showing that The Cove, a powerful conservation film, is starting to influence a modest but growing protest movement in Japan:

http://savejapandolphins.org/blog/post/some-good-news-a-demonstration-by-japanese-in-taiji-against-the-dolphin-sla