The Art of the Title …
We had an interesting evening at the club when Rose Atkinson came to discuss how we title our images.
Regardless of content, there are two people in every image … the photographer and the viewer … the title is a way of helping those two communicate. Whether that dialogue is successful or not can be swayed by the title.
Early art was often untitled or, if there was one, it could be seen as descriptive or functional. Vermeer, The milkmaid C1657 … the title merely served to distinguish it from others when written in a ledger. It was an index not an artistic statement.
Rembrandt’s The Night Watch actually began life as “The Company of Captain Frans Banning Cocq and Lieutenant Willem van Ruytenburch.” … it was one hundred and fifty years later, after multiple layers of protective animal glue varnish and years of soot from oil lamps had darkened the image that it was renamed with the moniker that we all now know. A new name, but still merely descriptive.
It was a style used by early photographers like Henri Cartier Bresson. He limited his titles to a location and year.
Ansel Adams would go a step further by often adding the time of year or time of day into his naming protocol. Such as Winter Sunrise, Sierra Nevada, from Lone Pine, California 1944.
In the art world, it was the rise of the public salon in the eighteenth century that saw the artists themselves getting into the habit of titling their own works as they took charge of their own catalogue. But it was century later that artists started using titles to convey emotion.
J.M.W. Turner was known for his long titles. “Snow Storm – Steam-Boat off a Harbour’s Mouth Making Signals in Shallow Water, and going by the Lead. The Author was in this Storm on the Night the ‘Ariel’ left Harwich” …
The author was in this storm changes the title from merely descriptive as we are invited to feel what it might have been like to be tied to the ships mast, as Turner claimed he was, so he could not only witness the chaos and might of nature but become more familiar with the emotion.
The American photographer Minor White also leant towards the poetic when titling his images …
Windowsill Daydreaming, part of White's meditative Sound of One Hand sequence. Images that explore states of awareness.
And titles that invite the viewer to see
through the subject matter itself, to engage with a bit of Zen … the philosophy that drove so much of his work.
Below are some of the talking points we used when looking at our own prints that we had brought in ... all in all an interesting way to get a handle on what I find the most heinous of photography tasks ... making up a title ...
