A job for the anthropologist
Reading The Big Picture — as opposed to just looking at the pretty pictures — is tedious. The reason is the mechanistic prose in the image captions. They’re apparently whatever caption the news agency that produced the image saw fit. By nature, photographers and editors of news agency photos don’t know what context their images will appear in, or even whether they will appear at all. They’re documenting something, and they can’t rely on context, so they pack the captions full of as much information, as much context, as many adjectives and dates and numbers as they possibly can. That makes them tiring to read. Especially when a set of images over the same theme is collected, like at The Big Picture: not only do you get bombarded with every scrap of info on an image available, you get the same context repeated over and over again.
This is one sentence:
Angel Valodia Matos of Cuba is led away by his coach after he kicked referee Chakir Chelbat of Sweden (at left), when Chelbat disqualified Matos for an extended injury time out during the Men’s +80kg bronze medal match against Arman Chilmanov of Kazakhstan held at the University of Science and Technology Beijing Gymnasium on Day 15 of the 2008 Olympic Games on August 23, 2008 in Beijing.
And it’s not even the whole caption.
Different agencies take different approaches; some have more human-readable captions than others. I bet an anthropologist could reconstruct the style guides of every news agency featured on The Big Picture just by reading and comparing the image captions. I am neither an anthropologist nor that bored.
