Photos and Words

Is a picture really worth a thousand words? Should photos speak for themselves or does the photographer need to guide the interpretation? Should we combine photos with words? Should we even have captions?

Yes. Wait…no. Man, I don’t know.

There are many answers to each of those questions. A photo may be worth a thousand words, but depending on the content of the photograph and the audience viewing it, just which words could be hard to determine. The photographer needs to determine what the message is and communicate that. If words are needed, use them. If not, don’t.

I remember my early impressions of Ansel Adams, probabaly the first photographer’s name I ever remember remembering. I loved his work. It was…um…pretty.

Recently, I watched a great special on public television about him and his work, and I never realized what he was trying to communicate or what he achieved through his photos, historically. Basically, the West was declared closed. We had tamed the wilderness. America had hit the West coast and civilized everything in between.

Ansel Adams felt that the wild was an essential part of America and being American. He did not want to lose that and so he proved otherwise with his photos. There was much untamed wilderness. His influence did much in the development of an environmental ethic, even when “environmentalism” was not a word.

Maybe that message was understood by the people of the time, but I am guessing it was not the “Such-and-such Mountain at Dusk” titles that communicated his message. They already understood or felt much of the context of his photography.

On the other side of things, most of my photos come from China and the cultures which live there. Without captions or some kind of communicated message, viewers would often have no idea what is going on in the photo, much less what the greater implications or story are behind the photo.

Basically, if you want to become an excentric artist, you can do anything you want. If, however, you want to communicate with your photography, you will need to evaluate the audience and how they will understand the content of your photos. You might even have some pity on later generations who will not understand the context at all and just go ahead and write a caption.