Perception is a powerful influence on the way we as humans view the world. It defines how we process the information we gather in our day to day life. How we perceive something can alter how we react to something. The same picture or group of words can cause drastically different reactions depending on how are perceptions have been altered recently. This is why it’s always worth a second look, don’t always trust your first instincts or the first thought that pops into your head on viewing something. One thing I feel that really demonstrates this point is the picture below.
I found this image on flickr, and as you can see from the comments on the original source here it tends to provoke a reaction along the lines of how it’s a prediction of what happened and usually of shock. Just to give you a little background on the image, it’s an ad from an airline called Pakistan International and it was used in 1979.
At the time it didn’t provoke much reaction, it might have been viewed as clever or something different. In away it’s quite an obvious step for an airline. What better way to demonstrate that you fly planes to a given location than to choose a well known landmark and impose a shadow of a plane on it. It’s simple and it gets the point across easily. I’m sure that no one at the time thought that this could be a fortelling of what was to come. Yet now people look at it and think it’s creepy and scary that it shows something that happened. It ust shows how perceptions have been changed due to the events of 9/11.
It’s worth remembering that sometimes a picture is just a picture.