Reading visual and statistical sources: photographs, cartoons and graphs
History · GCSE · The School
A photograph is a choice, not a window
A photographer chooses the moment, the frame, and what stays outside it. A photo of cheering crowds says something different from one of the same event taken a street away, where nobody is cheering. Ask what is INSIDE the frame, and what the photographer chose to leave OUTSIDE it — that second question is often the more revealing one.
Political cartoons argue, they do not report
A POLITICAL CARTOON uses exaggeration, symbols and caricature to make an argument in a single image — a bloated figure standing for greed, a small figure standing for a nation being bullied. Reading one means identifying the symbols, working out what argument they are making, and asking who the cartoonist wanted to persuade, exactly as you would with a piece of persuasive writing.
Graphs and statistics are not automatically neutral
A graph can be entirely accurate in its numbers and still mislead — a vertical axis that does not start at zero exaggerates a small change, and a graph showing only part of a longer trend can suggest a pattern that a fuller graph would not support. Ask what time period and what scale the graph covers, and whether a different choice of either would tell a different story.
The same NOP questions used for written sources — Nature, Origin, Purpose — apply directly to a photograph. A 1917 photograph of soldiers smiling in a trench: NATURE is a posed propaganda photograph, not a snapshot. ORIGIN is an official war photographer, working for a government keen to maintain morale at home. PURPOSE is almost certainly to reassure families that conditions were bearable. Read this way, the photograph becomes evidence not of what trench conditions were actually like, but of what the government wanted the public to believe about them — the same kind of source-versus-claim distinction taught for written propaganda, applied to an image instead of a page.