Relaciones texto-imagen en el libro álbum

Abstract

The article is about the relationship between image and text in illustrated books. This artistic and literary object offers an especially fruitful opportunity to analyze the relationship between the written communication and the visual communication, and it also constitutes a resource of great relevance to institutions that introduce reading such as kindergartens, schools and public libraries. In the image-text relationship, the preliminary limitation of both concepts makes necessary because the written can also be considered as well as an image a category. In this sense, we considered both terms from the definition of W. Mitchell, who prefers to talk about a Family of Images rather than about Image as a unique concept. From this perspective, we use as an analysis tool for the relationships between text (as verbal images) and images (as graphic images) the taxonomy established by Radan Martinec and Andrew Salway in their article "A system for image-text relations in new (and old) means of comunication" which was developed from a combination of approaches by Roland Barthes and the functional grammar of Michael Halliday. When this network of concepts is applied to the analysis of the relationship between text and image in the illustrated book, and specially to some fragments of the work of the Australian author Shaun Tan, we can observe several degrees of meaning, tensions and processes of reading overlap, which constituted the expressive richness of format and wich allows us to study, in a more clear and systematic way, the capacity to encourage reading and to develop creative processes of content transfer.