Paper short abstract:

With the visual turn in the social sciences, text has often been left out of the analysis. This paper explores (in)visible connections between image and text by focusing on Irish travel advertisement.

Paper long abstract:

With the visual turn in the social sciences, text has often been left out of the analysis. There has been some interest in the relationship between image and text, but rarely in any greater detail. In visual anthropology, there was the debate over image versus text where one side argued that images present circumstances that cannot be expressed in words, while the other side voiced the traditional anthropological view that text is the superior of the two forms. This paper explores (in)visible connections between image and text by focusing on Irish travel advertisement on the Internet and in travel catalogues. Images in Irish travel advertisements are characterized by scenes of hospitality, traditional music and dance, heritage and culture. There are green landscapes and dramatic cliffs along the coast. Following the notion that images are ambiguous, it will be argued that part of the particular power of images is what the viewer makes of them, the fact that personal emotional experiences are inserted into images. There are many ways of seeing, of looking at an image even though some images offer more room for flights of imagination. There are instances when images have a capacity to evoke emotional states to which it is difficult to do justice through words. Images are not contra text, in some kind of opposition to text. It is crucial that text and images belong together, they influence each other in a dialectical relationship. Images help to explain texts, texts steer the viewer´s interpretation of an image.