Retained

Author’s Note: I wrote about the photograph “Unspoken” by Sandra Raynor because we always write essays about text and based off my goal of text analysis and scoring tens in introduction, body paragraphs, and conclusion, I thought it didn’t necessarily need to be about text, so I wrote about a photograph (Plus I thought writing about an image would be easier and better quality than writing about text).

The black and white photograph “Unspoken” by Sandra Raynor tells the story of a young woman in isolation from the world around her. But the artist leaves it up to the viewer to decide the nature of her internment, and makes us wonder if her imprisonment is literal or emotional. Is it self-imposed, a result of withdrawal into grief or has she been rejected, placed there due to the actions of others? The artist gives us many cues throughout the work, such as the body language and posture of the young woman, the figure in the background or the iron bars in the middle ground, or even just the title itself. All these elements combine to create a powerful image of emotional withdrawal that is immediately familiar to anyone who has suffered the pain of separation.

The mood of distress is mainly communicated through the young woman’s facial expression and her body language, like how the main character fills the majority of the photograph. Also, you notice how her body position creates a fortress that separates her from her surroundings, with her knees are pulled tight against her chest and her elbows are drawn inward. She also huddles in a corner with her face turn downward almost hidden by her thick cascading hair. Her eyes appear closed as if focusing on something deep inside rather than on what’s going on around her. She grasps her head with her hands in a way that suggests her pain is almost physical.

This feeling of emotional withdrawal is enhanced by the passive, non-interactive relationship between the various parts of the scene. The young woman doesn’t acknowledge the photographer or viewer’s presence in any way even though we are seeing her from close range. It is as if we are observing her with a binoculars from a far off place, invading a private moment both uninvited and unacknowledged. The only other character in the photograph, a blurred male figure in the background, also fails to connect with the young woman or with us.

This impenetrable divide between people is maximized by the separation of the picture into two spaces, a foreground and a background. The bars function as a divider between these two distinct and distant spaces, and beyond the bars the background is blurred creating the idea of the distance between the girl and her surrounding world. The ghostly background figure haunts her but fails to materialize and end her isolation. Both division and obscurity suggest that these two characters might have once shared some sort of a relationship (if not a space), but now, something tragically keeps them apart, unable to breach the emotional or physical distance separating them.

The implications of the iron bars that divide the image are unmistakable. They clearly reference imprisonment and isolation but is unclear as to whether the containment is self-imposed as a way of keeping others out, or externally imposed as a form of captivity. On one hand the conditions of her captivity do not read as forced; her expression is one of internal turmoil not directed outwardly to an external threat. And because there is nothing in the photograph that refers to actual prison conditions one tends to interpret the bars as a metaphor for some sort of internal emotion state of thralldom rather than a literal condition. But what she is captive to is unclear. She might be a prisoner of her own alienation and pain or possibly a prisoner to her need and desire for the other that is beyond her reach.

The title Unspoken also affects the way we interpret this story. If we assume that the young woman’s anguish is somehow related to the ghostly male figure in the background then the narrative is about a dissolved relationship. After all, with minimal elements in the photograph to begin with, the male figure with his back turned to the scene and walking away from the young woman, no matter how ghostly, holds our attention. Might Unspoken indicate a failure to communicate, an absence of emotional exchange and connection? Sandra Raynor does not give us concrete answers to these questions but instead keeps active all these possible interpretations allowing the viewer to find their own empathetic response her visual story.