Understanding Emotional Images | 8 Master Examples

What do we call today Emotional Images and how do they work? This is a key question nowadays, as emotional content on Internet results more attractive for the users: it brings more clicks, more visits, more product sales…

Nothing really strange so far: we are responsive on emotions as they express our greatest happiness and misfortune, our most intense pains and pleasures.

Very easily we empathize with other people’s emotions, as we can’t help identifying ourselves with them. The link between emotions and images is not new, it exists long before our hypererreal times, increasingly dominated by emotional images. But let’s leave the theory for later and try to see for ourselves: what can we learn from photographic images that are decidedly emotional?

Emotional images through 8 examples

We would rather avoid considering the the first “emotional” images that we can find on the Internet, as most of them look a little kitsch. Instead, we have carefully selected 8 remarkable masterpieces, taken by photographers of the highest level.

1 – Migrant Mother, Dorothea Lange

During the Great Depression of the 1930s, Dorothea Lange was commissioned by the Farm Security Administration program (FSA), along with other photographers, to capture in images the difficult times the United States was going through. The goal was to capture in images the harsh reality of American farmers during the Great Depression. This would raise awareness and make the public more likely to help farmers. Let’s let the photographer tell us in his own words about the moment of the shooting:

“I saw and approached the hungry and desperate mother, as if drawn by a magnet. I do not remember how I explained my presence or my camera to her, but I do remember she asked me no questions. I made five exposures, working closer and closer from the same direction.” ¹

In this image, which is part of the Moma collection, we see a mother surrounded by her children. The children are hidden, their faces are not visible, except for the baby sleeping in mother’s chest. The image is dominated by the mother’s gaze, a gaze that ignores the presence of the photographer and looks far into the future, as if foreseeing the problems to be solved and the difficult situations that she and her children would face in the near future. She looks tired, her expression is worried, concerned. Lange has captured this moment beautifully, with a plain background where there are both light and dark parts, as if it were a metaphor for the uncertain future for this woman and her children, and in general for the whole society at the time of the depression. This image underlines the importance of fate as a source of emotions, and the ability of photography to masterfully capture this moment when the very soul of the person in the photograph is revealed.

2 – Melancholy in Hustlers, by Lorca diCorcia

In this image from the series Hustlers, by photographer Philip-Lorca diCorcia, we find a young man lying on the walk of fame in Hollywood, facing the star of John Lennon. His gaze towards the void, not towards the future like the migrant mother photographed by Dorothea Lange, but perhaps towards the past, in a melancholic daydream… we are in the register of sadness. And this is justified because these young men photographed by diCorcia in the series Hustlers, in financial difficulties, find themselves selling their bodies while waiting for an opportunity in the cruel city of cinema. Far from us the ambitions of peace and harmony advocated by the ex-Beatles and husband of Yoko Ono…

3 – Sadness facing nature

The Brazilian photographer Sebastiao Salgado is a master of emotional photography. In 1984, he went to Ethiopia, which at the moment was experiencing a severe drought that forced thousands of people to take refuge in the Korem camp. In the image, we find the members of a family, as if it were a crossing of the dessert. As a background a landscape between surreal and dreamlike, in all cases desolated, reminding us of the smallness of human beings in the face of the hazards of nature.

4 – Flower Power

We are in 1967 when a whole generation of young Americans is demanding an end to the Vietnam war. Marc Riboud, a French photographer, immortalizes the action of flower power activists against the forces of order. With courage, the activist Jane Rose Kasmir offers flowers to the soldiers, while some of her colleagues place flowers inside the guns of the soldiers who point them. Surprise, fear, anger, multiple emotions overwhelm us in front of this wonderful emotional image.

5 – Emotions of childhood

The idea of childhood awakens strong emotions in us. We find human beings in their primitive innocence, strong and fragile at the same time, worthy of protection and bearers of the world’s future. The American photographer Sally Mann has chosen childhood as her favorite subject, and she has spent hours photographing the children of her family. In the image below, what shocks us is to see a child carrying a cigarette. This is a very clear example of what Barthes would call the “punctum” of the image: the cigarette that the girl seems to be smoking, which scandalizes us. But when we take the time to read the title of this image, taken in 1989, we learn that it is a candy cigarette, and not a real cigarette. The example illustrates both how sensitive we are to childhood and how photography is capable of deceiving us in our interpretation of reality.

6 – Emotional image, image of love

Here is the very famous photograph by Robert Doisneau, entitled The Kiss at City Hall. In this image, taken in Paris in 1950, we see a couple kissing passionately on a side-walk. Immobilized by the photographer’s gesture, they seem like still statues amid the tracks of dizzying passers-by. As a background to this image taken in low angle, we find the city hall of Paris. In the foreground a table and a bar chair: they let us guess the position of the photographer. Everything indicates that this is a snapshot, a photo captured with skill by the hunter photographer, as in the decisive moment as Henri Cartier-Bresson would call it. However, and this speaks about the complexity of photography as a medium, this photograph it is a mise-en-scène carefully orchestrated by Doisneau. No matter if the emotion that emerges from this image is artificial or not, this emotional image is able to touch our feelings all the same.

7 – Anger and sadness in the face of inequity

Robert Frank, a Swiss photographer, published a mythical photographic work in 1958: The Americans. With his socially oriented eye, he showed sympathy for the underprivileged in his images, as he confessed in an interview for The Guardian.
His image Trolley, New Orleans, from 1955, reminds us that at that time Afro-Americans were not allowed to sit in the front lines of buses, and were forced to give up their seats to white people if they had to. In the image, one can’t help but see a cruel expression in the woman in the first window, while an Afro-American behind seems sorry, with a blank stare, as if petrified by the injustice. Emotions may well be negative (fear, anger), and a talented photographer like Robert Franck can transpose them into images in a masterful way.

8 – The joy of freedom

It was in the village of Simiane-La-Rotonde, in France, in 1969, that photographer Henry Cartier-Bresson captured this image, which we do not hesitate to count among the emotional images. This time it is the joy that is expressed through the bodies of these people, who seem to enjoy their time without worry. A joy that we associate with freedom, freedom of time, freedom of space, and especially the good company of friends and loved ones. An ode to serenity and harmony in the form of an image.

A little theory on Emotional Images

Is the Mona Lisa smiling?

Defining Emotions

The American Psychological Association (APA) defines emotions as “a complex reaction pattern, involving experiential, behavioral and physiological elements”³. Emotions show “how individuals cope with different situations that they find particularly meaningful”⁴. It is in the definition of the term “emotions” that we find two valuable clues when it comes to understanding emotional images. Emotions include feelings, but they are different from feelings because they are related to real events. Emotional images present individuals in the context of a situation, a problem, and let us see how they are getting through this situation.
The psycho-evolutionary theory of Robert Plutchik recognizes 4 fundamental emotions: fear, anger, joy and sadness⁵. These emotions associate with memory and thinking to give other 4 emotions, which Plutchik calls secondary: confidence linked to joy, disgust which comes from sadness, anticipation which follows anger and surprise linked to fear.
But how are these emotions expressed in the images?

Emotions and images

The association between emotions and images is not a new issue in photography studies. The many thinkers who were interested in the photographic medium often asked themselves the question of emotions. Perhaps it is in emotional photography that we will find the essence of photography itself.

Emotional photography and mysticism

Since the stone age, there is a ritual function associated with any image: images are able to link humans to the divine. There is a mysticism of images, even an ecstasy of images. These are twelve images, often found in churches, that define the passion of Christ. André Bazin, who studied the ontology of photography, found elements of an answer in the link between the image and death, between the image and the mystic⁶. Images, passion, emotions, here is our problem, and it is a question of knowing how these emotions invade (or not) the photographic image.

The punctum of Ronald Barthes

In his famous essay Camera Lucida⁷, Roland Barthes examines photographs in an attempt to determine the mechanisms that regulate our feelings towards images. He proposes very important conceptual tools that help us understand images: the studium and the punctum. The studium is in an image what we can grasp by using our knowledge, our culture. An image that only has studium is not interesting, because it would lack punctum. The punctum is what in a photograph comes to pierce our emotions, to touch our guts so to speak, to make us react, to make us sensitive. Barthes finds his punctum in a photo of his mother, who had died shortly before writing his essay. It is this deep, but very personal emotion, which triggered Barthes’ clarifying analysis of photography. Roland Barthes’ analysis shows what is intuitive: emotions are sometimes very personal, but when transmitted by emotional images them become universal.

Humanist photography

Jean Claud Gautrand describes humanist photography as “a lyrical trend, warm, fervent, and responsive to the sufferings of humanity [which] began to assert itself during the 1950s in Europe, particularly in France … photographers dreamed of a world of mutual succour and compassion, encapsulated ideally in a solicitous vision.”⁸
Humanist photography expressed especially in France, through the lenses of photographers such as Robert Doisneau, Cartier-Bresson and Willy Ronis, among many others⁹. In America the work of Lewis Hine, Dorotea Lange, Walker Evans and Robert Frank, among others, can be seen as an extension of humanist photography. Humanist photography from the 1950s onwards has developed a huge universe of emotional images.

Why do we like emotional images?

Why are we attracted by emotional images, that is, images that show the feelings of people while they are going through happy or unhappy situations? This is a subject studied by psychology, around a key word essential to understand emotional images: empathy.

Empathy can be defined as “understanding another person’s experience by imagining oneself in that other person’s situation”¹⁰. Research distinguishes between two types of empathy: emotional empathy and cognitive empathy. Emotional empathy indicates the extent to which we are able to feel the same emotion as another person, while cognitive empathy indicates our ability to accurately determine the emotion experienced by the other person.

Also, there are two mechanisms that explain empathy. Simulation theory indicates that when we see someone overcome by an emotion, we try to put ourselves in their place to try to prefigure the feeling associated with that emotion. In this way, we use the emotions of others to prepare ourselves for similar emotions that may affect us in the future. This theory has been supported by neuroscience, as scientists have found mirror neurons, whose function is to make us feel the emotions and actions we perceive in others.

Another mechanism, which is opposed to the simulation theory, also explains our capacity for empathy. It is the Theory of Mind¹¹, which mobilizes more the cognitive aspect: we are interested in the emotions of the other person because we develop models on how we must treat emotionally certain situations.

In any case, we are not all emphatic to the same extent, empathy is a positive capacity that can be cultivated, and emotional images are precious tools that help us develop this very human quality!

Related links about Emotional Images

https://ucsdnews.ucsd.edu/pressrelease/pictures_move_people_more_than_words

https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s11031-019-09780-y

https://www.frontiersin.org/articles/10.3389/fpsyg.2011.00311/full

https://www.researchgate.net/publication/233887401_Image_and_Emotion_From_Outcomes_to_Brain_Behavior

https://www.researchgate.net/publication/305729856_Picture_Perfect_How_Photographs_Influence_Emotion_Attention_and_Selection_in_Social_Media_News_Posts

Curated videos on Emotional Images

1. Dorothea Lange,” The Assignment I’ll Never Forget,” Popular Photography 46 (February, 1960).Reprinted in Photography, Essays and Images, ed. Beaumont Newhall (New York: The Museum of Modern Art), 262–65 ).
2. Vincent Pomarède, Dominique Ponnau, La Joconde, Éditions Prat/Europa, 1988, p. 47
3. https://dictionary.apa.org/emotion
4. https://online.uwa.edu/news/emotional-psychology/
5. The Emotions, Revised Edition, Robert Plutchik, 1980, revised edition 1981. https://www.amazon.com/Emotions-Revised-Robert-Plutchik/dp/0819182869/
6. What Is Cinema? Vol. 1, André Bazin and Hugh Gray. https://www.amazon.com/What-Cinema-Vol-Andre-Bazin/dp/0520242270
7. https://aestheticsofphotography.com/camera-lucida-roland-barthes/
8. Jean-Claude Gautrand, ‘Looking at Others: Humanism and neorealism’, in The New History of Photography, ed. Michel Frizot, 1998.
9. Hamilton, P., 2001, “A poetry of the streets?”. Documenting Frenchness in an Era of Reconstruction: Humanist Photography 1935-1960. In The Documentary Impulse in French Literature
10. https://lesley.edu/article/the-psychology-of-emotional-and-cognitive-empathy
11. https://iep.utm.edu/theomind/