To Title or Not to Title?
For the most part, I have always titled my images before putting them out into the world. Up until recently, this seemed to come naturally, the thoughts and flow around each image coming together to say something meaningful (to me). My latest trip to Zion was productive, not only for being able to slow down, spend time with friends, walking and reconnecting to the desert landscape, but also with respect to the number of images I made over the week that I feel good about.
I decided, as I have been doing in recent times, to put together an e-book as a way of curating the images into a cohesive visual collection where I chose to concentrate on form and colour together in deciding on the order in which to 'display' the images. As would happen at an in-person gallery exhibition, in the e-book you might view images in pairs or small groupings of three or four images, as well as having standalone images that fit into the general flow of the viewing but don't necessarily work within a group. When it came to putting the images on the website, the viewing experience is, of course, very different. Each photo is viewed as a standalone although there is still thought behind the order in which they are seen - in this case I decided to focus on colour to take your eye on a journey through the portfolio. Six months lapsed since releasing the free portfolio e-book until getting the same images on to the website, and that has mostly come down to choosing titles for the work.
So, I started to consider why bother titling artwork at all? Is it important to assign any words to art, whether photography or other forms of art? There are many ways to go about putting titles to your work; titles may be part of a series e.g. 'Cloud I', 'Cloud II' etc, they may be a short descriptive caption with specific information about the subject of the image ('Yellow Flowers in a Blue Vase' for example) or they may relate to an abstract theme. Perhaps the title has been decided before the work is even made. And, nowadays, you can have AI platforms autogenerate titles for you. Titles have the potential to increase the viewer's connection to the artwork, helping them understand or interpret what it is they're looking at. If they don't immediately understand, a title might encourage viewers to look deeper, asking questions of the artwork and of the artist.
In the end, interpretation largely comes down to the space between the piece of art and the viewer; the viewer brings their own life experiences with them, their interpretations of the social fabric they are woven into and out of, and their mood or emotions in the moment. For me, the title is not so much an extension of the artwork, as a part of the artwork itself. I spend time deliberating the titles because it's important to me that the work is experienced (by me) as a whole so that is how I present it. Often, as I make and later process images, there may be small shifts in the meaning I attribute to the image based on books I have read, quotes I have heard or music I have listened to, for example, and something will just click in my mind with respect to how I think and feel about the image.
For the Zion gallery, I think my struggle for titles came because it's such a large body of work that I made in a relatively short space of time - there are only so many threads of thinking that you can hold and move along at any one time. Whether or not another viewer interprets the work in exactly the same way as I do, is not important in my process or for my satisfaction as an artist and, as I have said previously, art is more about asking questions than about giving answers. I always enjoy how others interpret my work and the titles that go with it, and the titles I assign are certainly not meant to narrow those interpretations but rather expand and open the possibilities up further. Do you title your work and why or why not?