What Visuals Communicate to Me

The way I view visuals is that they can be very helpful when they are used in addition to another type of composition, such as an essay. This is because pictures can sometimes show things that are hard for words to describe. Not only do pictures show more than what words can say, but also I believe that pictures are truly worth 1000 words. For example, I can try all I want to describe what a person looks like, but my description does not nearly mean as much to someone as actually seeing that person, even if its just in a picture. When I see a picture or any other type of visual, I usually only see it for what it is, and I do not try to find some abstract meaning to it. One reason why I do this is because there are so many different messages that you can think that a visual is trying to convey, including the wrong message. I do not want to look at a visual and try to come up with different messages its conveying and then have those messages be wrong. Therefore, for example, if I see a picture of a flower, all I get from it is that it is a flower; the picture does not mean anything else to me. What I mean from this is that I do not think critically about the message the visual is trying to communicate; I am a passive reader of visuals. I do not know why I am like this, but I have always been this way. I have never liked abstract things and thinking critically about what something means is too abstract for me.