Fractious Relatives: Image and Caption

"What captioning protocols might we devise that, while acknowledging how image, caption, and text are a tripod of meaning, would accord the image a more privileged status?"
-Barbara Hodgdon, "Photography, Theater, Mnemonics: Thirteen Ways of Looking at the Still"

Via Goodreads.com

There are several unforgivable flaws in this book cover, and they have to do with the relationship of the image to the text of the book itself. First, the character depicted, Ged, is supposed to have brown skin and dark hair. This type of alteration is a chronic problem with visual adaptations of Le Guin's work, and it proves the point she was trying to make with the physical descriptions of her characters in the first place. Also, at no point in the book does Ged shoot lightning bolts out of his fingertips, as he appears to do here. This image is subject to its title, in elegant and somewhat foreign-looking font, and the author's name, which is featured prominently above the title in all caps. The smaller-font recommendation at the top also mitigates our understanding of the image.

kids.aol.com

For reasons that I have never really thought through until now, I despise book covers that are based on the movie. Part of it is a snobby, hipsterish desire to let people know that I liked this book before everybody saw it onscreen. But a larger part of it, probably, is that this image is subverting the primacy of the book even while it tries to sell the book. The title uses the script and colors of the movie posters, Prince Caspian appears in a obligatory 'epic' pose that differs greatly from his younger and more frightened image on the 1970 edition that I own. Everything about this implies the supremacy of the movie version, down to the bottom caption, "The Original Novels by C.S. Lewis," as if a movie-goer might stumble onto this book cover and be surprised to learn that their favorite new movie also has its own book.

http://screeninsight.blogspot.com/2011/10/star-wars-episode-iv-new-hope-george.html

This is a deservedly famous movie poster, and this example is interesting for the way the 'informational' text is sharply divided from the image and its accompanying text. The only thing that bridges these two elements is the title, which is appropriately half text and half image itself. It is text in that the title is made up of words, but the lettering is shaped and colored in a signature way that makes it more a logo than a text, and the words have a perspective that reminds the viewer of the prologue effect that Lucas uses at the beginning of each Star Wars film.