As a teacher of visual
text (both in the academic context of art history and in the context
of divination and fortunetelling), there’s one principle that I
hammer on: The principle of connection.

When we’re presented with an image, it’s often not enough to identify what’s happening. For the experience that makes an impact, what we need is to connect what’s happening to an emotional or a rational response, or both, depending on our immediate context for viewing.

Whenever we connect the image to the emotion that we associate with the image, or the image to the decoding nerve if we’re with a detective kind of an investigation, what we’re doing is create a story behind the image.

It’s for this reason that I always insist on considering the cards on the table as a possibility to connect the visual narrative frames with a story behind the frames.

If the…