A Picture's Worth a Thousand Words

In Errol Morris's piece I think that he is trying to say that we apply our own beliefs to the images we see. When we view an image we work to match some sort of context to it. Generally this context has to come from some previous experience or some previous knowledge that we have. As a result we find ourselves trying to create a story that matches the photograph we see. This can be a struggle as Morris notes when he says, "photographs tamper with the glue that holds life and memory together." I understand this statement to mean that when we look at photographs we are forced to apply context to them and in doing so we sometimes change our own thoughts and memories to fit the photo rather than the actual experience. I think that it is interesting to think about how much a picture can change a story, and how the caption of the picture is as important as the story itself. Once a caption is added to a picture we no longer have to fill the void with our own thoughts and ideas. Instead we can use the short blip under the picture as a starting point and then fill in the rest of the story with the information we know to be true. In the case that the photo is connect to a story, we don't even have to worry about adding our own thinking to the photo at all, instead we can take the facts we obtain from the story and match them to the picture where we find appropriate.
I found an interesting example of Morris's idea on NBC news. This article is about hacker attacks that are taking place in China that could threaten the US. The picture that goes along with the story is located about half way through the article and shows a girl walking in front of a building. On the main page this news story is shown with this photograph and no caption. When I first saw this I wondered to myself, what does a little girl have to do with hacking. The photo does not fit the headline in anyway. Therefore like described earlier, we are forced to add our context to the photo. In my head I began to form a story about this young girl disguised as a school girl being some sort of spy who was able to break into a secure building and hack into the system. However, once a caption is applied to the photo is clear to see that the object of the photo is in fact the military unit in the background and the young girl has no part in the story at all. This is a perfect example of Morris's idea and why it is important for us to have captions to our photos so we can determine what is real and what is fake.
http://usnews.nbcnews.com/_news/2013/02/19/17019005-successful-hacker-attack-could-cripple-us-infrastructure-experts-say?lite