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Context: Analyze

Captions can sometimes be seen as "transparent" context—we tend to think that words that run with an image explain, truthfully, what the picture is showing. But we need to analyze context as carefully as we look at what’s going on in the visual text itself. Without any accompanying information, this photograph shows a man with a bag over his head, holding a child close behind a chicken-wire fence. We might assume, because of the wire, that they are being held prisoner, but we need a caption for context.

Now, let's look at two different captions that ran with this same image on two different news sites—the American MSNBC and the British BBC—in April 2003, during the U.S. war with Iraq.