Week 3: Words and Pictures Disagree

Before the session#

Bring simple materials you can make three quick images with — paper, a pen, scissors and old magazines, or your phone. Nothing here needs polish.

The fixed sentence#

Use this exact sentence for all three versions below, unchanged:

She said everything was fine.

Same Words, Three Pictures#

This is the main studio activity. Using the sentence above, make three separate images:

• Version A — Agree: the image supports what the sentence says.
• Version B — Contradict: the image makes the sentence look false, incomplete, ironic, or unreliable.
• Version C — Reveal: the image shows something the sentence never mentions.

The sentence stays exactly the same in all three versions — you are not allowed to solve this by rewriting it.

None of the three need to be polished. Rough drawing, collage, photography, simple digital shapes, or typography are all legitimate.

Once you have your three versions, compare them:

• what the words contribute on their own;
• what the image contributes on their own;
• what meaning only exists because the two are read together;
• which version asks the reader to do the most interpretive work.

This Week’s Misbehaviour — Make the Caption Lie#

A smaller, separate exercise from Same Words, Three Pictures, done in 15–30 minutes:

• start with an image that looks reasonably straightforward;
• write a short caption that makes the reader question, reinterpret, or distrust what they think they’re seeing — not simply the opposite of what the picture shows;
• note briefly what the image seemed to mean before the caption, and what changes once it’s added.

This is not a fourth version of Same Words, Three Pictures. It works in the other direction — instead of a fixed sentence guiding three pictures, one picture gets destabilised by a caption written after the fact.

Afterwards#

Add your three versions and your caption note to your Misbehaviour Toolbox. Week 2 showed that changing how an image is framed changes what it appears to tell the reader. Week 3 held the words fixed instead and changed what the image did with them — agreeing, contradicting, or revealing something the sentence never said. Next week asks what happens when the story itself can’t be trusted.

The spec

What you bring to the session. Written so a reader can tell whether it has been met without asking you.

• you have one fixed sentence used across three visual versions
• you have an Agree, a Contradict, and a Reveal version of that sentence
• you can say what meaning exists only when the words and image are read together
• you have completed this week's Misbehaviour, Make the Caption Lie