What is it that makes one photo, arresting people’s attention in an irresistible manner, all the while inspiring their convictions, and another, a simple snapshot that does nothing more than inform viewers of who participated at what event?
The first image evokes emotions, its subject(s) seemingly reaching out and somehow bonding with viewers. Viewers identify with its subjects. They act upon the compassion it elicits. The photo touches their hearts while also speaking to their minds. It propels them to action: they give... they partner... they pray... some even go. Viewers simply cannot resist the photo’s impact upon them. Whether it brings them joy or sorrow, it begs them to answer the question, What is it that makes one photo, arresting people’s attention in an irresistible manner, all the while inspiring their convictions, and another, a simple snapshot that does nothing more than inform viewers of who participated at what event?
The first image evokes emotions, its subject(s) seemingly reaching out and somehow bonding with viewers. Viewers identify with its subjects. They act upon the compassion it elicits. The photo touches their hearts while also speaking to their minds. It propels them to action: they give... they partner... they pray... some even go. Viewers simply cannot resist the photo’s impact upon them. Whether it brings them joy or sorrow, it begs them to answer the question “Why?”
Yet, flipping through the pages of so many ministry publications or browsing their websites, reading their brochures or examining their appeals, viewers find it quite easy to resist these photos’ impact upon them. Instead, viewers are presented with simple, straightfor- ward, factual visual snapshots of “who,” “what,” “where,” and “when.” These photos just don’t compel viewer’s to action. At best, they inform the mind, yet never connect with the heart.
If this all be true, then why would any ministry not use compelling photographs? How better to show viewers God at work.
• Images of street children living in garbage carts in the red light dis- trict of Manila – photos that probably saved a young boy’s life and brought him life eternal.
• Photos of long-term missionaries, faces stark white with the shock of first smelling and then seeing the shabby, cardboard housed squat- ter areas to which they had been reassigned.
• Frame after frame of exuberant young boys and girls reaching their hands out to the sky attempting to get their Sunday School teacher’s attention. Those same hands later folded below bowed heads in a purity of prayer seldom found in older folks.
• Blurred video frames of school girls, their mouths covered, walking through the smoggy traffic crossing a bridge not over water, but spanning a long, narrow seemingly endless strip of what looked like storage sheds. Storage sheds with no water, no electricity, no heat, which were homes to hundreds of that city’s lowest caste.
• A window-lit portrait of the soft and pleasant face of one woman reflecting upon the life God had called her to among a billion plus of her countrymen. A woman who started 130 house churches, yet payed for this sin with 30 years in a dark, dank, dangerous prison.
Compelling photos – not snapshots – that help people look among the nations! observe! be astonished! and wonder! at all God is doing . Photos that motivate viewers to examine and then act upon their convictions.