Spinoff thread: Titles
divamum
Registered Users Posts: 9,021 Major grins
This came up in one of the #11 feedback threads and it started me thinking (always dangerous!)
I note that a lot of times the *title* of a photo is what gives it its meaning (or, in some cases, theme relevance for an assignment or competition). Is this typical in photography? The only place I ever come across this in music is in contemporary works which are so mystifying as to NEED a title to tell you what the composer meant, so this is all very different!!
This is genuinely a question and not intended to stir up a hornet's nest if I've inadvertently stumbled on some kind of "hot topic" in photoland (I'm a n00b, I'm a n00b - it's ignorance, not malice!!)
Anyway, just wondering. I see it a lot, and it piqued my interest
I note that a lot of times the *title* of a photo is what gives it its meaning (or, in some cases, theme relevance for an assignment or competition). Is this typical in photography? The only place I ever come across this in music is in contemporary works which are so mystifying as to NEED a title to tell you what the composer meant, so this is all very different!!
This is genuinely a question and not intended to stir up a hornet's nest if I've inadvertently stumbled on some kind of "hot topic" in photoland (I'm a n00b, I'm a n00b - it's ignorance, not malice!!)
Anyway, just wondering. I see it a lot, and it piqued my interest
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I don't think the two ever become fully separate. Just like we gesticulate (a kind of drawing in the air) when we talk, so we use words when we show pictures.
For me, a photo title is a hook which grabs more of a person than just their eyes. I think we would also use sound and scent etc to 'title' our photos, if they came as naturally to us. Such things provide context, as well as engaging more of a person's attention, and giving them some morsel like Hansel and Gretel's bits of bread to lead them into interpretation possibilities.
A photo bare of a title makes us unsure whether we are invited to it or would be trespassing. A title always makes a photo shared property, the photographer's and yours. At the same time, a title is like a signature which asserts authorship/ownership. 'Signing' cultural artefacts is a relatively recent custom.
Perhaps there is a similar relationship between music and words, though it doesn't usually appear as titles. When people are singing a tune with no words they often supply makeshift ones such as la-la-la. Poetry has some of the same aesthetics as music.
I think the basis for all these kinds of things is in the dynamics of the brain, what sensory regions connect more readily with what others.
Just some thoughts your question threw up...
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We've actually added titles to pieces of music after they've been written. Though I don't know when these titles were added I do know that they describe these pieces better than their more generic titles, for example:
- Symphony #3 by Beethoven: "Eroica"
- Symphony #6 by Beethoven: "Pastoral"
- Symphony #7 by Beethoven: "Apotheosis of Dance"
- Symphony #9 by Beethoven: "Choral"
- Symphony #94 by Haydn: "Surprise"
- Symphony #104 by Haydn: "London"
I agree with Neil in that a photo title is a hook that grabs someone's attention. These assigned symphony titles to the same. For example, if you see any one of these on a program with their assigned title, it's going to grab your attention more than just the generic title. That's what you want your photo to do -- grab (and hold) someone's attention.http://lrichters.smugmug.com
This is an intriguing idea; I love the idea of being "invited to share". And yet, I keep thinking of untitled (at least as far as I know) news photographs where the image is so clearly "telling a story" in and of itself that often you don't even need the accompanying article or caption. (then again, how many times do we see an UNcaptioned news photo used to demonstrate just how many interpretations there can be....?)
Fascinating stuff. Thanks for responding
But is the title to grab attention, or to suggest (impose?) an interpretation?
I don't have any answers, I'm just thinking out loud, indulging in a little bit of philosophical ruminating here. It's my birthday, so I'm allowed to be a little self-indulgent today
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Thanks!!!
I like what you said about how these titles "aid the listener in parsing compositional intention and going beyond the technique of the music into what the composer might have been trying to get across at a more emotive/psychological level." Ditto for photo titles.
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Aside for a little light relief: my husband teaches music history, and had to delicately point out to one of his less-observant students who turned in a lengthy essay about the seething passion of Beethoven 3 that it was not EROTICA (as the student cited it) but EROICA. Whoops!
I absolutely take your point (and, truly, I really am "arguing" all this in abstracto - it just interests me
While a photograph can of course be artistic and an image open to interpretation, imo it is more directly related to things we all know in reality than music. Most people can see a picture of a horse, and KNOW that it looks like a horse because they've seen a horse. Does titling it "Cow" make it something different?
As before, no answers, only more questions. I find this fascinating stuff to discuss - thanks for indulging me!
Happy birthday
I like to think of titles as nudging the viewer in the general direction of an interpretation. You can't plan on anything specific, because everyone sees things in their own way, but you can certainly start them down a path.
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"The point in life isn't to arrive at our final destination well preserved and in pristine condition, but rather to slide in sideways yelling.....Holy cow, what a ride."
I see the opinion...and I tend to agree...such as in the case of my current entry DSS 11..."Emerge" ....does anyone really understand/see what I am trying to "portray"...I saw a musician emerging from the black darkness which could be indicative of shadows i.e. shadows would then be indicative of silence, quiet, to sing which then she would become loud.
Did anyone understand the title with the photo?? Probably not..
As you stated pyry....
Did anyone understand what I just wrote....??? It all falls back on Pyry's statement:
HAPPY BIRTHDAY and hope you have many more!!
Peace
Donna P.
In my opinion, a photograph should not rely on its title to hold its own. In other words, if the photograph relies too much on the title for interpretation there's a problem with the title or the photograph. for example:
Say that the topic is 'cats and dogs' and I put up a picture of the nose of a pig, with the title "after being chased by the dog" or whatever. Bad example, but you get my drift.
The best titles are ones that enhance a photograph or its meaning, but not support it entirely.
I agree, although I'd rather say that the title should be entirely and obviously redundant to the visual message of the photo. And the degree to which the title adds or uncovers meaning in the photo is the degree to which the photog failed in his/her effort. So the title becomes merely a convenient way to refer to the photo and nothing more.
In the context of a contest or assignment, the title most likely serves as a bit of 'marketing' to convince the viewer to interpret the little two-dimensional rectangle full of pixels in a manner that enhances the photographer's chances of winning. If the image is weak, then the attempt at 'marketing' through the title is likely to result in 'no sale' on the part of the viewer.
Of course, we shouldn't underestimate the power of a strong title. Again, in marketing terms, would the perfume 'Eternity' smell any different if it were named 'Landfill'? Of course not, but we would all likely agree on which one would sell better! So, too, a photo title can help to evoke a deeper response by stirring a set of emotions or associations that the viewer might not have otherwise brought to the image on his or her own.
Wow, not what I got. I saw a beautiful woman who had kept herself behind the scenes (silent) emerging into becoming much more visible (loud)....and I like the photo. Liked it more before you brightened it btw.
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Thanks Dlplumer you did get what I was trying to portray...Whoooohooooo, I'm excited now...lol
I loved the darkened version, but on the advice of a few people, I upped the magenta lighting that was falling on her from the stage. What can I say...you win some you loose some...
Peace
Donna P
Yes! I think it does. And so did Magritte! If we take a photo of a pipe we could title it "Pipe", or follow his example and title it "This is not a pipe". Each title forces us to see the photo differently.
Scott McCloud's groundbreaking books about comics (which another dGrinner -justThorne - introduced me to) have a lot of relevance to photography. He makes much of the observation that a comic is more than the sum of its frames, and that the frames of which comics consist are cemented into the larger whole by the imagination of the reader. In other words, the gaps between the frames in comics are essential to what comics achieve because these gaps require the reader's imagination to fill them and complete the comic. (Among other fascinating things.)
A photo is like a comic frame in that it contains a part of a larger narrative. But unlike a comic frame it stands alone and is not a vehicle to receive, add to and carry the narrative forward via the gaps, where more is added by the reader. A photo is more like a box. But it can be labelled. By labelling his "boxes" (paintings) controversially, Magritte did something which comics do. He forced viewers to think outside the box.
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Whooaaaa.... ::mind officially blown::
I am now painfully aware how sadly lacking my visual-arts education has been. Point taken.
That said, Magritte was an intentional surrealist and, while it admirably proves your point (and how!), just how surrealist can something as realist as photography be? (using the Magritte example/idea I suppose the answer must be "as much as you'd like", but it's something that has NEVER EVER occurred to me before... thus why my mind is so blown!!)
Yes indeed - the power of silence; applicable to sound and movement as much as visual art, I think. This I understand more easily
This (below) has been more where I've been to date, but your somewhat contratrian view, Neil, has my brain on fire (in a good way!)
So, coming from the same point of view as Izzy's above, I'm not sure I 100% agree with (don't yet fully understand?) this idea of a title not only allowably but ADMIRABLY filling in the blanks and "supporting it entirely", but I'm beginning to think my literalism is actually stemming from ignorance as much as anything - I'm not entirely familiar with the grammar of visual artistic interpretation and understanding, and need to acquaint myself with its language more fluently.
Thanks for all these GREAT responses - I find them all so interesting!
Thanks too for the birthday wishs
I will see a title for a photo and in my minds eye I have already visualized what it might be, but I am totally blown away when I click on the photo, and I actually visualize with my eyes what the photo is.
Example: Photographer "bagaras" I believe is his name, has a GREAT shot.
The title of the photo is "Holding on to my nuts" your minds eye visualized one thing, but when you actually see it with your eyes, the photo is of a Frog hanging from a cluster of acorns.
He has another shot, that is entitled "Delicates" when you click on it...it is of a girl upside down in a washing machine.
Sometimes titles can make you want to see what is behind it, the title enticed me to want to see what accompanied it.
Orhan Pamuk, Turkish Nobelist, in his book 'My Name Is Red', set in Istanbul five hundred years ago, in one passage has a character relate stories that illustrate the tragic consequences of asserting ownership of art. In one, a Khan and one of his harem concubines, who love each other passionately, feel they have conquered the inevitable erasure of their bond by Time by having a miniaturist paint their faces into the characters in the traditional scenes painted into hugely expensive books. The miniaturist becomes proud of the Khan's patronage and yields to the temptation to share in the lovers' immortality by introducing touches of 'personal style' departing from the traditional conventions of painting. When the Khan sees these 'irregularities' begin to appear in the books he becomes suspicious that his beloved is betraying him. To revenge himself and make her jealous he takes another concubine. His beloved hears about it through the gossip of the harem, and secretely hangs herself. When the Khan finds out he has the miniaturist blinded.
In another story, he presents the proposition that the artist's signature robs the masters we learned from of credit, and that personal style is achieved by defacing their perfection.
More stuff to chuckle over...
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I'd disagree that almost any of the above is necessarily true. (Though I'd agree that a title is often used as a crutch to prop up a failed effort.)
I think this whole discussion would benefit from appreciating a range, with "labels" on one end, and "ambitious titles" on the other. That range is evident throughout the history of painting, music, photography, and so forth. "Labels" are virtually "sticky notes" that simply identify a piece by words so it can be listed or referred to in text. "Ambitious titles," on the other end, add a whole dimension of appreciation to the work (per the Magritte example that NeilL brought up).
To expound on that, McCloud demonstrated that readers are forced to "participate" by filling in the blanks between panels. He shows six different types of sequences that leverage this. The simplest, the "moment-to-moment" transition, is nearly like two consecutive frames of movie film - the reader only has to imagine the obvious continuity. The fifth kind can be years apart between them, and the reader will immediately adopt all kinds of assumptions or connotations when yanked forward like that. All that is just background, but it's the sixth kind that I find most interesting to the topic at hand. His sixth type of transition is the non sequitur.
McCloud shows that even when two wildly incongruous panels are placed aside each other (for example: beer-drinking guy annoyed while waiting for his pizza, followed by a satellite in orbit around the earth), the reader will find themselves stimulated and participating in the attempt to connect them. And my point is that (I believe) this same extent of power is available between a single image and attached words.
I'm not suggesting that titles should be non-sequiturs, but rather that by "pushing outward in that direction," titles can be very powerful, and real assets to the sum-total merit of an image. Ideally, an artist inclined to title his work (beyond mere labels) is thinking of the "magic middle" and trying to leverage it.
And then, of course, success at doing so is a whole nother question.
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Anyway, great, great stuff. WOW.
Isn't that the power of puns, really? Those are very creative but, ultimately, it's a very complex play on both words AND image, rather than the words "filling in the blank". I think. Isn't it?!
Another question indeed, but an important and related one!
A photo, to my mind, is a rough equivalent of a sound recording... a 'performance' is captured, and the business of capture is quite different to the business of performance.
In my experience of singing (The University of Sydney Chamber Choir), you operate in real time interacting with your proximal environment (yourself) and the space (which holds your audience) you are in. You are doing a lot of self-monitoring and self-talk, you generate your voice in the halo you create around your upper body and head, you float it out at a point about 20 meters in front and slightly above you, you register the feedback from your body, from the space, the symphony of your voice with the acoustic environment it is contributing to, you sense your emotional response to this experience, the emotional impact on the audience of the music and the living presence of the piece in its performance.
None of any of that is part of the recording process.
Similarly, a photograph is a completely different thing to what it records... Thus, as Magritte said, 'This is not a pipe' .
The title of the photograph can make the link between the realities of the real time subject-'performance' and participants-audience, and the completely different reality of the photograph... Thus, this is not a pipe, but your experience of my recording of an event involving a pipe. That is, this is, in bare terms, 'art'.
So, the title opens and expands for the viewer the single reality of the photograph to the other realities it is related to. 'This is not a pipe' is multidimensional, and therefore art, compared with 'This is a pipe'.
This is a kind of 'filling in the gaps', but I think it is a richer idea than McCloud's, and perhaps one reason why comics are less of a compelling experience - they lack, in general, the dimensions of reality.
The problem with style which I nodded to in my previous post, and which Pamuk's parables illustrate, is that it puts at risk the integrity of the reality the photograph is related to, and so unless it is eminently and emulatably successful at maintaining and intensifying that link, as in the grand masters, it limits and weakens those extra dimensions, and accessibility to them, rather than facilitates. Likewise, a signature, by putting the sign of the artist right in front of our noses, a sign which relates to a reality irrelevant and extraneous to the realities of the work itself, just about crowds out the relationships which the work depends on.
Thus, the tragedies in Pamuk's stories.
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Sound is much harder to "capture". Any sound exists for its duration and then is GONE - it can never be recreated in the same way (except electronically). This is particularly true of singing, where the instrument itself - the PERSON - is in constant flux and never exactly the same from moment to moment. When we add in anomalies of acoustics (including the effect of climactic/atmospheric factors) and the EMOTIONAL element (whether that be from the sound-creator, or the energy that develops between performers or even between performers and audience)... there's something that's almost impossible to capture. In the course of my career, I have become fascinated by recording and spend a lot of time researching and testing different ways of recording myself more *accurately*. While one can get pretty close (digital recording is a wonderful thing!) I am reliably assured by people who have heard both the original performance and the recording that, no matter how accurate it may be, *something* is different.
Somehow, the record a photograph creates of something *visual* seems much more solid - I suppose if one parses it completely that can't necessarily be true (although I think one can certainly more ACCURATELY recreate a visual scene than one can a sound), but for me a photograph is already somehow more connected to a reality I can see and hear; it's external, not internal; it's more *real*.
Where I will agree with you wholeheartedly is that the "process" and the "result" (or impact) in either medium are two COMPLETELY different things, and two completely different experiences. I'm *starting* to come to terms with this in photography... just this morning, in fact. I captured a shot of my daughter last night; to me, it's a summation of her sillliness as I took it ("Mom...!! Not again! NO MORE PICTURES!!!"), a pretty decent shot capturing the child she still is and the young woman she is becoming, and the many technical things I see that I don't like. And yet, circulated among friends overnight, I woke up to a HOST of comments all of which have responded to a particular aspect of it which SPOKE to them. It said something to them and elicited a strong response. To keep this on topic, I guess to me it's titled "Practice shot of my daughter with cool catchlights" but they saw "Mona Lisa Smile". I wonder if I had *put* a title of some kind on it if the responses might have been different?
I'm rambling - my apologies. As I keep saying, I find this immeasurably interesting... if difficult to keep my own rhetoric from getting completely tangled up!!
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Actually I belive the title of that painting is The Treachery of Images."Ceci n'est pas une pipe." is text in the painting, but not the title.
This is actually a classic example of the fact that many images are often presented without their titles and Magritte was careful, as I think we all should be, to make sure his painting stood on its own without the title. In this case he did it be including the critical text in the image itself. The Treachery of Images hits exactly the tone I shoot for when titling a photograph in that it clarifies the meaning without being pedantic.
I was thinking about this today as I was out and about.
While I love the Magritte example, one thing we're forgetting (or bypassing): it wasn't a photograph. It was a painting. Which, by its very nature, implies being one remove from reality already.... doesn't it? A photograph for all that we manipulate it (even more so in the digital age) is at least in THEORY a more representational image.
But then (arguing with myself for a moment), how often do we see a media image that we KNOW has been heavily enhanced and manipulated (the average fashion magazine has about as much to do with reality as Magritte's image). It's almost FAUX representational, as the fact that it's a photograph of it leads us to *believe* it in a way we don't a drawn image, and yet we all know that it often been shaped and formed into something which has very little to with the reality on which it was actually based.
Not sure where this leads us, but at least y'all made me think
Actually, I disagree with this. Personally I think of terms like representational, impressionist and abstract as describing intent rather than a medium or technique. The is a rich tradition of representational painting just like there is a tradition of abstract photography. However, if you are thinking of journalistic photography (or illustration), usually they get captions rather than titles which serve a somewhat different purpose.
But I wonder why? Why should this "standing on its own" be an inherent value over "gaining even more from an apt title?"
Obviously, it's good to press oneself toward accomplishment by producing fine photographs that don't require titles. But isn't it also potentially a vital accomplishment to marry a photo and title for a result larger/more multi-dimensional than the sum of its parts?
Not asking to be combative, but rather because I'm very intrigued with both sides of the issue. Is it merely a value assumption, or am I missing an obvious basis for it?
And as a side-note, it's worth noting that Magritte simply could not have accomplished the same net result without mixing words into his image. Regardless whether it was the actual title or not, I think it points (undeniably) to the potential value of mixing both lingual and visual communication into one unified whole. (We certainly have no prevalent objection to photos which ironically leverage roadsigns or billboards or anything like that, right?)