A picture is worth a thousand words

AP Photo

Someone said it right. "A picture is worth a thousand words." It is said to be a Chinese proverb, and some attribute to Napolean Bonaparte's saying in French which translates to "a good sketch is better than a long speech." Wherever it came from, pictures are definitely great forms of expression and also a means of communication.

If we listen to the "censored" TV broadcasts from Iran's state run TVs, we might believe that there is not much going on there, and everything is normal in the country. However, the photographs that we get from there from professionals as well as amateurs tell us exactly what the situation is like and what is going on there. Photographs not only gives the expression of what is going on within the frame, but they also give us the idea of political, social, economic situation of the specific location or country and sometimes the whole world. This is the reason why photojournalism is such a powerful means of communication in the news media. Now, we have TV and internet, so we can be aware of what is happening in the world in a matter of seconds, however, even there, pictures play a great role in giving the audience of the real feel.

The famous photograph (picture) by Eddie Adams during the Vietnam war  - the picture of police chief General Nguyen Ngoc Loan executing a Vietcong prisoner on a Saigon ( Vietnam) street on February 1, 1968, gives us the idea of what the political situation in Vietnam was like during that period. Apart from that, we can feel the agony the prisoner might have felt in being executed and the feeling that he might have had on the gun being pointed toward his head with his hand tied. This photograph won the photographer a Pulitzer prize, and it even changed the course of photojournalism.

With this article, I have tried to put together a slide show of ten different photographs from different periods of time which truly are worth more than thousand words, as these photographs are the turning point in photojournalism and photojournalism is viewed. There are a lot more photographs by great photographers who cannot be matched, however, due to the quantity I am allowed to upload, I have chosen these ten.