"Caption" Self-Assignment

Seldom in my years of writing TOP have I gotten more private email responses to a post than those garnered by "In Praise of Captions." I suspect many people wanted to respond but felt a certain peril in entering into a public discussion that they might have sensed was a bit volatile, or had the potential to be.

So, as a sort of corrective, I thought I'd put forth a modest exercise, a possible self-assignment. Sort of the same thing as the "Praise" post and its followups, but inverted into purely positive form. Now, please do note that I am suggesting this just as an exercise...that is, as something to try that you might learn from, assuming you're not already used to doing it. I'm not trying to dictate to anyone how they should work on a permanent basis (nor am I suggesting that people who don't do this are doing anything wrong).

So anyway, here it is. First, take a picture of something important, or important to you, or at least interesting or curious, in which the subject of the picture is clear. A picture such that anyone can deduce what you meant to show—what the picture is of—or, at least, that you can defend as showing that thing clearly. A photograph in which the facts of the picture are in evidence. I might even go out on a limb and call such a picture a "portrait," albeit in the loosest possible sense in terms of its subject matter, which need not necessarily even be a noun. Could be an action or an event, too.

Next, scribble down—the words need not be turned to a literary polish—the Five W's of that picture. (At the link, note especially the first sentence under the subheading "Principle.") Do take the time to really write them down—don't just think about it and pretend that's as good.

Next—no need to write these answers down—ask yourself a few questions about your picture.

• Did you "get it"? Have you given an adequately satisfactory idea of what the thing looks like? Could you have done better?
• Is the photograph good?
• Was the subject worth photographing? Worth having a photograph of? To you? Would others think so, do you think? Is there anyone you can ask about that?
• Rate the picture for honesty, on a scale of 1 (poor) to 5 (good).

Finally—pen or pencil in hand again—write down, briefly, the story of the photograph. Again, no requirement for eloquence, no points off for not being a writer. (The work of Jim Goldberg comes to mind, in which he lets his subjects write on the print what the picture means to them. Their lack of writerly eloquence itself is often eloquent.)

By Jim Goldberg

Once you've finished, repeat nine more times. (An aside: if you undertake my exercise in a contentious spirit and try to make a mockery of it, I'm not sure you still won't get just as much out of it.) Note that it might take a while to collect ten of these.

When you've finished all ten, time for a few more questions (again, no need to write the answers to these down either):

• Are these pictures different than your usual ones?
• Do you think they're better or worse?
• Has this exercise at all changed the way you look at things when you're deciding what to shoot?
• If you'll keep any of them, will you keep them because they're good photographs or photographs you're proud to have made, etc., or will you keep them because of what they show—or perhaps both?

As with any exercise, this is just a suggestion. Exercises are for people who are learning, not for people who already know.

Me, I'm still learning.

Mike

P.S. Once you get the hang of this, the next time you're looking through "test shots" or Flickr flotsam or random pictures adventitiously encountered hither and yon, let a little voice go off in your head asking, "What's this a picture of?" Not complicated, but you might find it can be more revealing than you might imagine.

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Original contents copyright 2011 by Michael C. Johnston and/or the bylined author. All Rights Reserved.

Comments

[Jay Frew]

I imagine, literally ;~), that the use of "captions" is more wide-spread than you think...in this era of digital imaging they might be called "keywords". While they may not always placed on the same visual plane as the image, they are often contained in file names and other image-data descriptors.

Cheers! Jay

[John Krill]

As a Marine Corps photographer for 4 years during the Vietnam War we weren't required to get any written info. We had reporters that did that. This means that most, if not all, the work I did in Vietnam that I kept has no caption info. Big, big mistake. Memories suck. Try to remember anything after just ONE week and you get the idea.

The book 'Daring to Look' by Anne Whiston Spirn goes deep into the work of Dorothea Lange and her methods for captions.

Worth a read.

Also check this post out. I thought of you first posting on captions when I saw this:
http://www.bhinsights.com/content/pieces-puzzle-mise-en-scene-photography.html

[Tony]

The picture of the injured girl is still with me. It makes the issue of captioning seem less important, at least not important enough to stress over. There are very few times in my life where I have seen that sort of image, with explicit injuries, a few war photos and a couple from specific events, mybe a dozen.

Regarding captioning, I was going to say, "its just photography, not curing cancer", but then of course it is an image that put me in this mood... funny old world.

[Craig Beyers]

Mike - Is the problem not "what are pictures of" but "what are pictures about"? I see many pictures in my photo club's competitions and, although I can tell what the picture if of, I often wonder things: what is the picture about (i.e., the story, the context, the significance) and why the photographer included that picture in the competition. I've noted that pictures are only "of" something seldom win ribbons from judges. Pictures that are "about" something are more likely to win ribbons. Thoughts?

[James]

An interesting exercise, but in my case, not for the reasons you post it. I am a hobby photographer. I "publish" half a dozen or so of my pictures each year, to picture frames (mostly 8 x 6 inches) in my house. No need for captions.

What I got from your exercise is some clarity into why one of my photographs failed. I live in the East Anglian Fens (drained and reclaimed land that sits mostly below sea level, and is as flat as hell). The story of agriculture is writ large in this area, and that includes the failures of agriculture. About 100 years ago, before tractors, farms were limited in size to what horses could manage. Farmhouses were built on 100 acre plots, and now sit, mostly derelict, in clumps of 10 or more surrounding the modern agribusiness that now farms 1000 or more acres.

I photographed one of these tumbledown wrecks, knowing all of this, but the photo did not work to anyone I showed it to. Just a pile of bricks and overgrown ivy. Going through your words above and the 5 "W"s, I can now understand why the photo did not work. Not enough context and storytelling. A particular problem was that I was too close in. I should have been 100 yards away, showing the landscape through a wide angle lens, with a modern combine harvester or tractor ploughing and the ruins recognisable but not dominating, not the detail of the ruin.

[John Krill]

Now we have Magnum Photos requesting help in adding information to their archive of photos. The story is at Lens: http://lens.blogs.nytimes.com/2011/07/26/crowd-sourcing-the-magnum-archive/

[Geoff Wittig]

I shoot landscapes, and you'd think the who/what/where would be utterly self evident, yet I found this to be a fascinating exercise. Some of my large prints are hanging in a public space, without captions, and many viewers have asked me "what's that a picture of?" I've customarily identified the location, figuring everything else was obvious. That's clearly not the case. Perhaps this explains why many of the viewers seemed unsastisfied by my answer.

Most of what I do involves assembling multiple frames into HDR panoramics with very careful processing to get as close as possible to natural perception (well, at least the way *I* see things). Believe it or not, I really hadn't given a lot of thought to what I was attempting beyond creating a beautiful image. But Mike's exercise has encouraged me to contemplate what I'm actually trying to accomplish. I do a lot of hiking in a really beautiful part of the world (NY's Finger Lakes region). Sometimes it sucks; pouring rain, or clouds of mosquitos, or bitter wind. But many times the place, the light, the season and the weather condense into one of those heart-stopping moments of beauty you remember for years. *That* is what I'm trying to express in a print big enough to convey the feeling.

Dang it, Mike. Now I'll have to spend the upcoming weekend writing, carefully typesetting, and printing a set of caption plates that help the photographs convey what I'm trying to say. I'm already halfway through the design and typography process, which is creative in its own way. It's also helping me focus my next project location.

So many photos, so little time....

[Walter Dufresne]

It's been a few decades since I first looked at the FSA photographs and read their accompanying captions.
There's often something deeply moving - and poetic - about the plainness of those original captions in relation to the graceful plainness of the photographs.