Caption Confusion

           What is an image without a caption, and a caption without its image? Often times we are so absorbed in images we forget the words if there are any. You see an image and think, “holy crap, they depicted that so wrong, that didn’t happen like that.” Wait, what about the words? Don’t the words have any role in how you think about a picture, especially in a news article? Morris states, “Often…there are captions below them, or they are embedded in explanatory text.” Coming across an article, on two different news sources, about Jodi Arias’ trial I was indifferent about one, but shocked at not just the way the picture was captured but also how the caption presented in the other.

New York Daily News gives us a typical photo that would be taken in court with the defendant on the stand and the prosecutor standing to the side asking a question. This is fair enough.  The article Jodi Arias, claiming ‘memory problems’ when under stress, hammered by prosecutors for apparent holes in story as testimony in gruesome 2008 homicide continues is paired with the photograph and a caption that reads, “Prosecutor Juan Martinez asks Jodi Arias a question about her diary during cross examination in the Maricopa County Superior Court in Phoenix. Arias is on trial for the killing of her boyfriend, Travis Alexander in 2008.” The prosecutor is pointing to Arias in accusation of being unable to remember events of the day the victim died. This evoked no emotion of anger or pity for me personally, but it did make me want to understand the full story.

Now on CBS New’s Crimesider section the article, Jodi Arias Trial: Woman charged in lover’s murder struggles to explain memory lapse, is paired with not only a hostile photo but a caption that confirms how you feel about the image. Prosecutor Martinez is no long just pointing at Arias in accusation. Instead he is closer to her and is holding up her diary with an angry look on his face while Arias looks like she’s just enduring the questions. Already a feeling of hostility is mustering in my mind when I look at this image, but the caption put a cherry on top of it all. Under the photo it states, “Prosecutor Juan Martinez seen interrogating defendant Jodi Aria during cross examination testimony in Maricopa County Superior Court, Thursday February 21, 2013.”

Both articles are close to being identical in the information they provide about Jodi Arias being unable to recall information; although, with the simple change of a word the each picture evokes a different emotion. In the CBS article, I felt bad for Arias, almost like I was watching her be attacked. But in the NY article I only saw a woman who was being asked a question that she was trying to answer.

Not to mention the fact that the words “interrogate” and “ask questions” also play a huge role in the way you view the image. Interrogate evokes the idea of already assuming the person is guilty and the prosecutor is just trying to prove that point. Whereas asking a question seems like a less harsher wording, and can be seen as a form of curiosity.

The image and caption both prepped my mindset when reading these two articles. Every time I looked back at each picture corresponding with the article I become more confused as to whether she is forgetting because he is being so hostile or if she is simply lying. An image has the ability to skew one’s understand of what they are reading and the caption only adds on emphasis.

NY Daily 

CBS News