A lot of the theoretical basis for the relationship between text and images comes from our McCloud reading. There he laid out how text is the purest symbolic abstraction of some concept, whereas images act immediately and directly to communicate their meaning. Because they act at different speeds and cause people to receive ideas differently, pairing them together can communicate things that neither can on their own. Here, beyond the individual meanings of the text and the images in Gerz’s pieces, the framing of the two side by side creates meaning in the gap between them. The viewer is forced to extract meaning from the piece as a whole that neither text nor image alone would ask of them as they are used to both mediums in isolation. I know I personally darted back and forth between the text and image multiple times, and switched between treating them separately and together, generating many stories and possibilities because the framing of the piece demanded it.