Whether they’re spectacular wildlife shots on Instagram or creative portraits on a business website, images exercise a fascination. It’s hard to imagine life without them, either on social media or in corporate communications. Even so, people still underestimate their power.

If you follow professional photographers on Instagram you’ll often find your jaw dropping open at the power and expressiveness of the images they publish. Many of these photographers provide an insight into their work and also show the how they’re created from behind the camera. It soon becomes obvious that these fantastic images are no snapshots taken casually on a smartphone. In some cases an enormous amount of work and effort has gone into them. To get that cute picture of a family of lynx in the Canadian snow, the photographer might have had to ski-trek and camp their way through temperatures well below zero for days on end.

Photoshop and its predecessors

But why is so much effort put into pictures when the latest image processing technology can create just about any motif artificially and place it against any desired backdrop? The answer’s quite simple: images are more than just the banal representation of objects. Images tell a story. In the best case they tell the story the photographer or their client had in mind. By the time it reaches the eye of the beholder, the picture will have triggered an interpretation. That’s why the saying “a picture says more than a thousand words” is as true today as it ever was.

People were already aware of and trusted in the storytelling power of photographs back in the 19th century. Under the banner of “spirit photography”, William H. Mumler offered portraits in which deceased people could be seen – fakes more than 150 years before the advent of the smartphone. His customers included the widow of US president Abraham Lincoln. Mumler’s skilful use of double exposures to conjure up the spirits of the dead in his images gained him a sizeable clientele of spiritualists. Given that photography seemed to represent an immutable reality, these pictures were popular evidence of the presence of the deceased. In 1869 Mumler was brought to trial for his alleged scam, but was acquitted.

Focus on the story

Even if fakes are increasingly used to deceive, not every professionally edited image is a fraud. On the contrary, image processing is merely an element supporting the representation of the story. Are you familiar with the famous image of the “Napalm Girl” Kim Phúc from the Vietnam War? The original of the photo, taken in 1972, shows a larger section of this scene of fleeing children. Several reporters and war photographers can be seen along the side of the road. But the picture was eventually edited so that the focus was on the girl screaming in pain from napalm burns. It tells the story of the horror of war and conveys to the viewer the immediate suffering of children in a conflict.

The scene with the reporters could also have told a story – simply a different one. It would most likely have distracted, however, from the children’s pain, and perhaps even relativised it. Even cropped, the photo remains real and shows the situation as it happened – it merely shifts the focus.

Values and messages in imagery

What I mean want to say is this: every picture conveys a message, whether it’s in a piece of reportage, a picture portrait or corporate communications. The latter in particular continues to be underestimated. Any image a company publishes via its channels functions as an ambassador of the business and reflects its values. If an organisation preaches diversity but shows a team photo of ten men in a LinkedIn post, the message is pretty obvious. Whether you’re presenting portraits of employees or selecting imagery for websites or business presentations, the main emphasis should be on conveying your own message. That requires effort, and often can’t be done with stock images. But it’s worth it because it makes the images visibly individual and more meaningful.

So always consider the story an image tells. Because it will be told in any case.