> >Titles are either cloyingly twee and sentimental, or they are the > >photographer's way of telling you what to think, or both. > > > >Photos don't need titles, they need captions: who, what, when, where, > >why. > > So if I displayed a photo telling you those things, how much > of it would > matter to you? What about the answer to why? Isn't that me > telling you > what to think? > > Geez, my words in this very post are creating small > electrical impulses in > your optic nerves which triggers recognition, and then > synapses fire and you > think "That damn Tom C. There he is altering my brain waves > and telling me > what to think again".
No. A caption is something like this: "FRANCE. Paris. 1st arrondissement. In front of the Louvre museum. 1994. " or: "INDIA. State of Bihar. Famine stricken area. Due to flooding and drought, in 1951 the province of Bihar was heavily stricken by famine. The US sent 136 million tons of wheat and a 190 million dollar loan, while the USSR sent 50.000 tons of wheat. April 1951." Both picked more or less at random from Magnum's site. Something that tells you what to think would have some kind of editorial content. For instance, the 2nd caption is from one of Werner Bischoff's pictures of an Indian woman & child apparently begging. If it was captioned "Woman begging because of famine caused by Indian government incompetence" it would be editorialising - telling you what to think. A title would be something like "The Beggar Woman", which attempts to make the woman stand as a representative or archetype of all women begging, rather than as an individual, and it would tend to ignore her suffering as an individual. Other titles which you might see for such things include "Nobility", "Suffering", "Capitalism" and suchlike. I'm sure most of us are familiar with the type of thing, and can easily recognise the difference between a title and a caption, in this context. Regards Bob -- PDML Pentax-Discuss Mail List [email protected] http://pdml.net/mailman/listinfo/pdml_pdml.net
