The blessings & evils of "explanatory text"

[Heroique]

Your exhibit is in a few days.

Everything is done, except explanatory text for each print.

That's easy enough – shot location, date. Nothing more.

But your images are so rich – maybe you want to include more text than that. Your viewers might miss what you want them to see. And they may not understand the technique that made it possible. A failure in communication.

Do you enjoy explaining your work to viewers? Or does this only distract them from your work?

I'd enjoy hearing your best tips about striking the ideal balance.

[Kimberly Anderson]

My projects all demand explanatory text. My work is highly documentary in nature and I have found that without the supporting text much of the meaning of the photograph, why it is important, is lost. Some have criticized my need to rely so heavily on the additional words, but I don't care, it's just the way that I am comfortable working.

As for how much...well...that is a delicate balance. I usually err on the side of leaving the viewer/reader wanting to ask more questions. I usually try to leave something unanswered so that it could potentially strike up some curiosity and move the viewer to do their own research and look into it further. My supporting text is rarely, if ever, about technique. It is usually about history and the story that made the location significant.

Good luck!

[vinny]

I don't typically say much and would rather not name images but there has to be some way for people to communicate which print they're talking about, especially when they want to buy it. I often get "what is that?" when it comes to certain prints. I'll then explain it's contents and how I photographed it which I do enjoy sometimes.

[paulr]

I'd eliminate the word "explanatory" almost entirely. I'm a big proponent of text, where it's appropriate, but I'm not looking for explanations.

What's appropriate? It depends on the nature of the project, and possibly on the nature of your audience. The less likely the viewers are to know where you're coming from, the more likely that supporting materials will help.

Here's a way to approach the problem. Think about what's interesting to you in the work, and what you'd like other people to see in it. Then take a big, big step back from it, clear your head, and consider all the many other ways the work might be interpreted. Think about the wide range of ideas and prejudices and interests people bring with them to a show, and how these can influence what they focus on and how they interpret things. Then think of ways that you can gently draw their attention in the direction you want.

There are many ways to do this. Text is only one of them. And since text draws so much attention compared with some of the more subtle cues (framing, grouping, sequencing, etc.) it demands a lot of care.

For example, what you mentioned: "shot location, date. Nothing more." This is actually loaded. It sends the message "this is work in the documentary style. It is straight. It is factual. I, the photographer, am stepping out of the way, or at least pretending to." It places your work assertively in a tradition of others who labelled their work similarly. Which itself was, in part, a reaction against titles like "So Sings the Muse of Tragedy."

So maybe location and date should be there, but maybe not. Maybe no text. Maybe a paragraph for the whole series. Maybe a paragraph for each image. It really depends.

Here's what I never want to see in text: an explanation of what the piece is about. Or worse, a description of how it will make me feel. The latter may sound ridiculous, but I see it in artist statements all the time. "My landscapes unsettle the viewer, causing them to question their most basic ideas about love, sex and taxidermy." Shut up, artist. You have no idea how your work affects me. You do your job, I'll do mine.

Some better possibilities for text: if the work does have a documentary component, is their any factual history or supporting information about the things/people/places that will allow me to see more and appreciate more? If you're working in a way that's unusual and likely unfamiliar, and this is significant, can you clue me in? Is their any biographical information about you that is especially relevant to the work? Is text actually a part of the work? Like, are you responding directly to a text, or using the images to inspire text, or collaborating with a poet?

[Drew Wiley]

With all the cutesy titles that gallery and web photographers assign to their market images, I suspect they sub out the nomenclature work to the same kind of person
who invents paint chip color titles - probably some psychopath Hannibal Lector type doing life in a plexiglas cage, with nothing better to do. Mission statements and
and interminable discussions of lenses and f-stops gets even more redundant. Publish a how-to book, or discuss it here. But the print should stand upon its own
merit. I don't label my prints at all.

[DrTang]

depends

if it was a solo show - I wouldn't even put that (shot location, date)


but if it were a group show - where I knew from previous experience, the other photographers named their photographs..or had a lot of text...well..I might just open a bottle of Makers Mark and spend the evening coming up with the most pretentious and long winded dreck I could think of - for each

[C. D. Keth]

I really try not to even title a lot of my pictures. I prefer an absolute minimum if I do.

[Andrew O'Neill]

I don't explain the work. I title it (sometimes "untitled") and indicate medium. The viewer gets from it whatever he gets from it.

[Tin Can]

+1

I'd eliminate the word "explanatory" almost entirely. I'm a big proponent of text, where it's appropriate, but I'm not looking for explanations.

What's appropriate? It depends on the nature of the project, and possibly on the nature of your audience. The less likely the viewers are to know where you're coming from, the more likely that supporting materials will help.

Here's a way to approach the problem. Think about what's interesting to you in the work, and what you'd like other people to see in it. Then take a big, big step back from it, clear your head, and consider all the many other ways the work might be interpreted. Think about the wide range of ideas and prejudices and interests people bring with them to a show, and how these can influence what they focus on and how they interpret things. Then think of ways that you can gently draw their attention in the direction you want.

There are many ways to do this. Text is only one of them. And since text draws so much attention compared with some of the more subtle cues (framing, grouping, sequencing, etc.) it demands a lot of care.

For example, what you mentioned: "shot location, date. Nothing more." This is actually loaded. It sends the message "this is work in the documentary style. It is straight. It is factual. I, the photographer, am stepping out of the way, or at least pretending to." It places your work assertively in a tradition of others who labelled their work similarly. Which itself was, in part, a reaction against titles like "So Sings the Muse of Tragedy."

So maybe location and date should be there, but maybe not. Maybe no text. Maybe a paragraph for the whole series. Maybe a paragraph for each image. It really depends.

Here's what I never want to see in text: an explanation of what the piece is about. Or worse, a description of how it will make me feel. The latter may sound ridiculous, but I see it in artist statements all the time. "My landscapes unsettle the viewer, causing them to question their most basic ideas about love, sex and taxidermy." Shut up, artist. You have no idea how your work affects me. You do your job, I'll do mine.

Some better possibilities for text: if the work does have a documentary component, is their any factual history or supporting information about the things/people/places that will allow me to see more and appreciate more? If you're working in a way that's unusual and likely unfamiliar, and this is significant, can you clue me in? Is their any biographical information about you that is especially relevant to the work? Is text actually a part of the work? Like, are you responding directly to a text, or using the images to inspire text, or collaborating with a poet?

[Darin Boville]

I think Paul basically nailed it in his post (above).

How I think of text is not as explanation but as a pointer or rough direction.

Take a movie analogy--when people finance movies they went as much of that money to be up on the screen rather than spent on catering, etc which doesn't so much change what the viewer sees. Meaning you are putting into a photo is much the same. You want to put as much as possible into the image itself and as little as possible into any supporting materials.

Most people's work is multi-layered to them. Some layers are easier to talk about in words, other not. Some layers are near the center of the thing, some layers are peripheral. I find it useful to use text--project titles, short texts, even full length essays--that help to get the viewer started. For example, I have a project called "Stieglitz Nebulae." It is made up of black and white pictures of what appear to be weird clouds. Now, if you are intimately familiar with my work, and you know your photo history, and so forth--but I titled them "Untitled"--you'd have a good chance even without the titles of starting to wonder why I shot them and did they refer in some way to Stieglitz's cloud photos, his "Equivalents." And off you'd go. But with the title you remind a lot of folks who had forgotten about Stieglitz's work or never knew it in the first place and help them see the connection, gives them a starting point.

The trick is to never explain the photo. Just like a good joke can be ruined by explanation, a text or even a title can ruin a photo if it captures too much of what the photograph is. You want as much as possible up on the screen, not in the text box. I'd go so far as to say that if you can basically explain a photo (or painting, etc) in words then embodying it in a visual work of art is probably a mistake. The central layers of any work *should* be hard or impossible to put into words. That would be their very nature. (But its also easy to hide a weak photo behind claims that what is embodied cannot be explained, etc. A critique an artist should challenge themselves with.)

Another movie analogy (this one not quite fair but it gets the point across). Look at a Woody Allen film (Manhattan) and a Stanley Kubrick film (2001). Look at just the script. With Allen's an awful lot of the central core of the film--the emotional core--is communicated via the words. You could read just the script and "get" a big part of the movie's experience. 2001, on the other hand, probably has a script a dozen pages long. But it isn't just the lack of words--even if you wrote descriptions of the scenes you'd miss the target. You have to see them, to have the experience. A second example is Arthur C. Clarke's book of 2001 (Clarke wrote the movie script in conjunction with Kubrick, the movie is not based upon the book, which came after). Clarke explains too much, very much like explaining a joke. It all makes sense but it isn't funny anymore. The aesthetic experience is missing.

(Footnote, I like Manhattan very much--one of my favorite movies--and growing up I was a big fan of Clarke and the other old-school sci-fi writers...although, further truth be told, I just tried to read a modern sci-fi book by a respected writer and had to put it down--sci-fi writing perhaps is doomed to juvenilia).

--Darin