Addressing the Elephant in the Room- The Picture in Sustainability Communication

Pictures are everywhere. They influence our thinking, our behaviour and how we understand the world around us. While pictures are story tellers themselves, they are also accompaniments to other modes of storytelling like the written text.

In telling a story, a picture as we encounter it, has been constructed in a number of ways. The communicator actively makes choices in terms of the nature of things that are included and excluded in the picture. Decisions made include the nature of entities that are picturised, the relationship between these entities, their positioning in the frame of the picture, the lighting, the camera angles, the focus, the colours etc. A number of changes to the picture can also be made at the post-production stage.

The honest picture project is interested in the pictures used in sustainability communication.

What is an Honest Picture?

A couple of examples from BP’s Sustainability Report for 2017 will illustrate just two of the different ways in which pictures are being used in the sustainability context.

Sample 1. Page 49 of BP's Sustainability Report of 2017

In Sample 1, a page from the above report, the text describes BP’s efforts in upskilling and providing opportunities to local people in Oman, one of the countries where it has operations. It also carries a quote from an employee who is clearly identified in the text. The person depicted in the picture used alongside can clearly be identified as the same individual with a name tag and the BP logo identifiable in the overalls he is wearing.

Sample 2. Page 27 of BP's Sustainability Report of 2017

In Sample 2, BP offers information regarding its efforts to reduce and offset carbon emissions. The accompanying text identifies a member of a panel that advises BP in this respect alongside a quote from him. The picture used in the page does not directly associate with the text in any way. There is also no caption and the entities in the picture are not identified.

The fantastical nature of the aerial shot of a road winding through a wooded forest connotes operations that are in harmony with nature. A world where economic progress (signified by the road) can happen with no or minimum damage to delicate ecosystems. A simple reverse picture search of the picture shows that it is a stock image easily available for purchase.

Now, let us suppose, there was to be a hypothetical continuum to describe the honest use of pictures in sustainability communication, then it can be argued that Sample 1 may be near the honest end of the continuum and Sample 2 near the dishonest end. For simplicity, we define the ends of this continuum as well as pictures closer to either ends as honest and dishonest pictures respectively.

We can now start defining at least some of the features of an honest picture in sustainability communication:

• Contextual Harmony: The picture at first glance does not seem out of place in the context of the surrounding text or other elements of the page.

• Emotional Engagement: Notwithstanding the overwhelming evidence pointing to the picture as a superior mode when it comes to emotionally engaging a reader, a determination can be made that the picture has not been used merely to seek emotional engagement with the reader.

• Alignment with Text: Beyond reasonable doubt, the picture and at least part of the text should be talking about exactly the same thing. A good example would be a sustainability text that includes details of certain places or individuals, and the accompanying picture is identified as pertaining to these same individuals/places as in Sample 1 above.

• Source Attribution: An additional scenario arises when it is explicitly stated that a picture has been used for representative purposes and the source attribution (where applicable) has been provided. In these cases, again, it may be deemed to be a case of honest picture use.

Decoding Honest Pictures: The Uniqueness of Our Approach

While the above conditions provide a useful basis to assess honest picture use, their usefulness is limited by the subjective nature of assessments made on this basis alone. This is where our approach is unique. Our determination of an honest picture is made on the basis of the decoding of several representational aspects of the picture and its contextual setting. This approach is cross-disciplinary in nature and borrows extensively from visual research spanning several decades in fields such as advertising, communication studies, semiotics, multimodality, art theory, document design, etc. and includes the various aspects of interest as shown in the table below.This is the basis of our approach to reading the sustainability picture.

The nature of picture use is determined by a consideration of a number of factors, a summary of which is provided in the table.

We believe that a visual communicator of sustainability has access to the vast number of resources associated with each of the above aspects to realise different kinds of meanings. A decoding of the inventory of the choices made in this respect will help decode the picture and on the basis of the result of this decoding, a picture may then be assessed as being honest or not.

In the age of digitisation and sustainability, honesty in visual storytelling matters more than ever. The Honest Picture Project is dedicated to exposing greenwashing and enabling honest picture usage in sustainability communication so that the sustainability narratives truly reflect the values they claim.

NOTE: This page is best read in conjunction with the page on rationale which justifies our focus on sustainability pictures.