Task: To what extent has text been part of your practice up to this point? When have you found it most effective? Can you think of instances where your use of text – titles or captions perhaps – has ‘intimated’ too much for the viewer? Has text ever undermined your photographs?
To date, my practice has focussed predominantly on the visual image. In both my workshop seminars for the Royal Photographic Society and when delivering images for clients and or friends, accompanying text has played no part in the expected or actual delivery.
However, I have, in promoting my work made extensive use of websites to create a number of specific personal platforms on the internet. Specifically davidrosenphotography.com for my landscape and architectural work, at-streetlevel.com for my street photography portfolio, and more recently discoveredatstreetlevel.com to showcase my urban environmental portraits. Within each of these websites, my images have been captioned. A practice I have felt uncomfotable with, as the captioning displayed no real consistency. Unsurprsingly, as I had little idea at the time as to their role and influence on viewer perception.
Despite reading widely, my photographic books had been limited to improving my craft skills, creative self-development, an improved understanding of the aesthetics of image-making, and photobooks from my favoured photographers. It is therefore no surprise, that I had been unaware of Rolnd Barthes and many others who have commented widely on the role of intertextuality and semiotics within photography.
Through the writings of Roland Barthes in particular, I am beginning to understand the way in which we percieve the visual image and how text can distort, accelerate or clarify our perceptions. I now wonder if my over simplistic captions have quickened the perceptions of my images, allowing the viewer to interogate their meaning at a superficial level but avoid or dissuade a deeper and more meaningful interaction.
Take for example figure 1, which I entitled with the caption ‘The Camberwell Stare’. This implies that the stare is a common feature of life on the streets in Camberwell. It may also imply that the stare may originate from one particular ethnic group towards another. All of this may be untrue and may distort the actual reality of the scene being depicted. It would perhaps have been better to leave the image untitled, supported by other similar work that might shed a more in-depth and representative perspective of life on the streets of Camberwell. As Susan Sontag explains “all photographs wait to be explained or falsified by their captions” (Sontag 2003).
FIGURES:
Fig 1: ROSEN David. 2023 The Camberwell Stare
REFERENCES
Sontag, S. 2003. Regarding the Pain of Others. Picador
The Photography of David Rosen 