2-8

"Liar, Liar, Pants on Fire", written by Errol Morris's from the New York Times, is telling us how pictures can not tell the truth or false without any captions. Morris exemplified a picture of "the Lusitania", the ship that was "off the coast of Ireland en route to Liverpool from New York when it was torpedoed by a German U-Boat and sank on the evening of May 7th, 1915. About 1,200 of the nearly 2,000 passengers and crew aboard drowned, including more than 100 Americans.*" Before I read the story behind the picture, I thought it was just an old picture of a ship. I did not even think there could be a tragic story behind it. Like this pictures, picture itself may say thousand words, but it cannot tell the truth to the viewers, because the viewers have no background information that they can use to understand what the picture is about. That is why most of the news articles' pictures have captions. Even on Facebook, it always helps me to understand a picture when people describe what it's about. One of my friends posted a picture of a dog. If she did not mention that it is her new dog, Basie, I would not have known that it was her dog. I could have guess that it is her dog, but I would not have unless I talked to her about it. As Morris states, "Pictures may be worth a thousand words, but there are two words that you can never apply to them: 'true' and 'false.'".