Two simple categories of text and image are affirmative and subversive: affirmative where text can support, or conclude an image, or indeed an image conclude, support or even illustrate, a text, and subversive where the opposite occurs, the viewers assumptions of meaning changing radically through the treatment of image or text.
(Image: http://www.mattsgallery.org/artists/doherty/1-02.jpg)
The above image, taken from 'same difference' by Willie Doherty, is a good example of the sometimes subversive nature of the relationship between Image and Text. The same woman's face is shown on two slide projections, with a range of different words over the top, alternating between the 'good' and the 'bad', such as 'volunteer', 'murderer', 'angry' etc. The treatment of text remains exactly the same, and the result shows just how much the viewer's perceptions of the image changes according to the meaning of the word shown in front of them. I think that this not only highlights the power of Image and Text in manipulating meaning, but also how we, as viewers are almost pre-conditioned to read all text as supportive, or affirmative, particularly when, as in 'same difference' it is branded across a picture.
(Image: http://www.notcoming.com/images/features/saulbass/wss_closing/2.jpg)
We were then shown Saul Bass's end titles for West Side Story, which uses moving image to set text directly into the landscape and sets of the film itself, transforming the relationship between text and image into a hybrid, whereby neither one can be separated. This allows the camera to pan across the text, alluding to a sense of choreography and movement key to the nature of the film itself, something that is far removed from John Smith's 1976 film, 'Girl Chewing Gum'
(Image: http://freeartlondon.files.wordpress.com/2010/03/d_the_girl_chewing_gum1.jpg)
In 'The Girl Chewing Gum', nearly all sense of movement is given by the characters within the shot, characters that John Smith's spoken 'text' leads us to believe are being choreographed by the director. However, as the film progresses, the narrative itself begins to lapse further and further behind the action within shot, and it becomes clear that the text itself is a description of a scene. The final reveal of the film is the realisation towards the end that the narrator is in fact not even in the street, he is standing in the middle of the field.
The effect of this in Image and Text terms is a sense of subversion of our own preconceptions of movement and time, as well as space. The viewer assumes that the narrator is next to the camera at the time of shooting, because that is what they are being shown, and the end result is a questioning of the image being displayed.