Travel Essay: On the Value of Photos

What is the value of a picture? One thousand words? Ten thousand words?  And who came up with the concept of assigning a numerical value to pictures in the first place?

As a travel writer I know that photographs have value.  The one shown at the left helped me sell a story about Sitka, Alaska to the Los Angeles Times, and the newspaper paid me separately for my words and the photos that accompanied them.  And professional photographers, like my mentor, Robert Holmes, know the value of photos, too; they earn their livings selling images which they created after surveying the scene before them through the camera lens.
 
The travel editors of magazines and the Sunday editions of newspapers engage in “Show & Tell:  They use photos to catch the reader’s eye and draw it to the written word, and then tell the story.  Without the attraction of those photographs, the pages might as well be blank.

In my mind, there is one magazine that “gets” this concept better than any other:  National Geographic.  It printed its first issue in October of 1888, about 50 years after the medium of photography came into being, and two decades after explorers began bringing back images of their world travels.

Before the advent of digital cameras, we tourists might bring a few rolls of film with us on vacation and take a dozen or more photos of people and places.  But professional photographers sent on assignment by National Geographic would carry hundreds of 35mm film canisters and shoot thousands of images, knowing that the magazine would only use a handful of the very best to illustrate a story.  No wonder those who have read “NG” over the years always found the photographs in that magazine splendid beyond description.
 
An outstanding example of how images can transport the reader to a far away place is “Edge of the World” which appeared in the January 2010 issue of National Geographic.  The light falling on these landscapes and the composition of these scenes make the photographs taken by Jim Richardson truly stunning. Basalt pinnacles reach up into a gray sky hanging ominously over fractured mountains. Callanish stones thrust up from the ground like the fingers of a dead granite giant buried beneath the green-fringed soil. Fog floating over a watery expanse below bare, brown hills suggests that Winter is approaching close on the heels of Fall. I will probably never get to the Hebrides Islands depicted in Richardson's photos, but I feel as though I've been there time and time again.

So what is the value of a picture? One thousand words? Ten thousand words?  Can it be measured in dollars and cents, or is the answer:  Simply priceless.

(Click here to view more photographs by Jim Richardson)