What do you call a picture? Do you even need to name a picture? Many pictures that are entered in competitions or shown in exhibitions have titles, but what is the title for? Isn’t the content of the picture what it should be called? It all feels a little weird.
I can understand descriptive titles for things that need to be described. Context can be useful: reportage needs the context to make sense of the image, for example. Most books have titles to give you some sense of what the book is about. Indeed, many non-fiction books also have a subtitle to explain the title. But do pictures need the same level of explanation?
I joined a photo club during the pandemic. It’s fun and interesting. There are frequent showings of pictures, which is great. But it seems that pictures get a title to explain the image. If you have a lovely landscape shot of Windermere it might be sensible to call it Windermere so that the viewer knows where it is and doesn’t mistake it for say, Hartlepool. But you don’t need to call it Light over Windermere. I can see by the picture that Windermere had light. On the other hand, what should I make of a picture called Moonrise, Hernandez, New Mexico? It is precisely labelled. I suppose you might not need the moonrise, but it does explain what the white spot is for anyone who was uncertain. It’s also not called evening mood or something equally trite. Calling a picture Study in light or Study in form is tautologous and open to error: it is either what you called it or it is not. And if Study of … is just an excuse to take pictures of nudes, then the title becomes a pretence. You want to take a figure study? Here’s two fingers you can start with.
Perhaps worse than the faux-artistic are the humorous titles. If the picture is good, it shouldn’t need a punchline. And if it needs a punchline, why not do it properly and add a speech balloon?
I can appreciate paintings, for example, without knowing what they are called. The title is only useful for referring to it in conversation – it’s more accurate than saying something like the big blue one. You might argue that similar titles imply the artist saw them as a set, but good curation can also put a set together, and so can the pictures looking like they belonged together. So perhaps the purpose of a title for art is to allow cataloguing?
I do have some of my own pictures up on the walls, if only to cover the damp and cracks, but none of them are titled. There’s no need: the picture either looks nice or it doesn’t and that won’t change with what I call it.
Photo club competitions and exhibitions though, they are the home of the name. Every image does need a name, for the same reason a painting does: to be able to identify a specific image. But the specific has given way to the poetic. This is where you will find a picture of converging verticals called converging verticals. Or a landscape taken at dawn called dawn light. I confess, I did once put in a landscape shot of a formal wooded garden called something like Crick Castle. The judge queried the title, as the castle was not visible. So I said it was behind the tree. Nul points.
So I guess what I am arguing against is tautology and florid titling. Call it what it is, because if you have to tell people what to see, you haven’t shown them clearly enough.
Fup Duck Photography 