Yude Wang

Business leader, Parent

I love photography. Normally, I take my family out with my camera every week and create some images. By creating good pictures, I am able to express my emotions and imaginations. And I even taught my son to be a good photographer.

When it comes to a picture or a photograph, most people would assume that a still picture can't tell a story. However, a famous American documentary photographer Lange once said, “Everything is propaganda for what you believe in”. So under some circumstances, a picture can surely tell a thousand words, even if it’s unmoving and undemanding. To begin with, professional photographers don’t “take” pictures but make them, just like writers writing an essay. Every camera adjustment — speed, aperture, filter, frame, depth of focus, angle of vision, etc. — shapes the outcome, as do the myriad manipulations made in the darkroom in developing and printing. So do the writers. In order to fully describe objects, writers need to use many adjectives and adverbs even some kinds of rhetorical devices such as metaphor, personification and irony etc. However, a good picture has nothing familiar with a concrete of words. Every picture was not recorded but created by the photographer who surely believes in something. And the harder and the deeply he or she believes in that thing, the more in a sense he or she is a propagandist. The result being that a picture can convey a complex idea or subject that can’t be easily depicted via words. What’s more, a picture can express deeper meanings than thousands of words. Such cases abound in the realm of arts, and wash paintings, which are composed of only black and white, can serve as a compelling and convincing example. The artistry of wash paintings is the retainment of the empty spaces. On those parts of the paper, the painter didn’t add any brushstrokes in order to encourage viewers imaging and thinking, and these retainments receive most compliments. This kind of artistry can hardly be depicted via words, because everyone has different imaginations, but the words only represent the viewpoints of the writers, just as the common saying goes, “There are a thousand Hamlets in a thousand people's eyes.”

I'm helping applying for hosting a TEDx event in my hometown.