As I was looking back through Los Caprichos, I couldn’t help but think of my class last semester that dealt with comics and graphic narratives. One of the major focuses of the class was the relationship between text and image. In many of the comics we read, the text and images were both vital to the narrative. Neither could tell the entire story without the other. If you lost the images, the text often made very little sense whatsoever. If you lost the text, a vague narrative could be conveyed, but much of the depth was lost. I find myself feeling rather similarly about Goya. In almost every image I’ve seen so far, I feel like it requires both the image and the text for me to gather a deeper understanding of the pieces’ intricacies. The text and images CAN be viewed independent of the other, but it is only when the two are put in communication that I feel any sort of deeper understanding. Perhaps that’s just my own disposition to art, but I thought it was interesting nonetheless.
2 thoughts on “Text and Image”
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I agree that the text and image together adds another layer of depth to Los Caprichos. This communication between mediums reminds me of something my Self in Society class discussed last semester: that watching a baseball game on TV with the mute on is a lot different than listening to one on the radio. Many of us agreed that listening was more effective in making you feel like you’re physically at the game. This example makes me wonder whether text resonates with some people more than images, or the other way around, although the two together probably offers more depth like you said.
Something that interests me about the book that we have is that it contains additions to the captions or titles Goya provided. Each print is accompanied by the original caption and also one provided after the creation of the print, and by a different author. I find these additional captions interesting because their purpose is a little bit hard to decipher: some of them are explanatory, and give insight into, for example, Spanish puns unknown to an English speaker, or personages depicted in the print. But then some of them seem to exist just for the sake of adding to the joke, such as in Print 71, where the caption reads “Even if you hadn’t come, you wouldn’t have been missed.” Whoever wrote these captions seems to be interacting with the image on different levels; sometimes the caption is didactic, other times it serves as passive observation, still other times it makes impassioned exclamations, and sometimes the caption seems to be a continuation of the image, spoken by someone or something depicted therein.