Cut out some pictures from a newspaper and write your own captions. 

1. How do the words you put next to the image contextualise/re-contextualise it?

2. How many meanings can you give to the same picture? 

Try the same exercise for both anchoring and relaying. Blog about it.

Anchoring of words can drastically change the meaning of images as I showed in the first image in this blog where I created several different anchoring captions.

The lack of green space, early in the day when it’s quiet, lack of cleaning resource, Big Ben refurbishment and also the quality of maintenance in the capital are just a few ways the first image can be interpreted with the use of anchoring text. It is easy to see how the same image can be used in different contexts and can have several different meanings. Photographs are often used for political and environmental messages nowadays.

Relay words I found far more difficult to come up with since this involves more thought and deeper creative thinking than that for ways to anchor the image with text. I think relay words, if placed on or near the image in an eye catching font or a handwriting is far more powerful and impactful than anchoring and it could potentially influence political change more than the anchoring text used by newspapers to put across their particular political views, but the newspapers need to appear to be neutral so this would be frowned upon by the audience and alienate certain groups.

Relay text is a method of expression I plan to think about using in my own words. In future assignments I need to think more about the text that accompanies each image and what that image does to the meaning of the work.