"A picture is worth a thousand words": most good images tell a story, one that is often left to the viewer to imagine. This is particularly so when the images are of people. Sometimes a story is created by using the image in a particular context - curators of contemporary art and photographic galleries are adept at doing it and may assign a temporary meaning to a picture which resonates with specific trends, concerns, understandings, of the public they wish to address. The title of the image is all important. Even photojournalism does not rely solely on the image to tell a story, but on a combination of an aptly devised title to go with a picture. And in our digital age, the title and the hashtag are essential for the purpose of being discovered in online searches. Few people post images on Instagram without a hashtag.
I once did a shoot with photographer David Nuttall, with whom I used to work a lot when I first started modelling. When he sent me the images from that shoot I was reading Jungian analyst Layton Schapira and her description of the Cassandra woman:
"What the Cassandra woman sees is something dark and painful that may not be apparent on the surface of things, or that objective facts do not corroborate. She may envision a negative or unexpected outcome; or something which would be difficult to deal with; or a truth which others, especially authority figures, would not accept. In her frightened, ego-less state, the Cassandra woman may blurt out what she sees, perhaps with the unconscious hope that others might be able to make some sense of it. But to them, her words sound meaningless, disconnected and blown out of all proportion."
As I looked at the images, I read all this into one of them, so I entitled it "Cassandra's sorrow" and displayed it with that title on deviantArt - of which I am still a member, ten years on. Neither David nor I was thinking about Cassandra when shooting, the narrative unravelled later. And it is a narrative that fits.
In another shoot I did with Suki Wilde, the story was discussed in advance. Suki is an actress, a model and also a photographer. She brought several props with her, and we used the theatre where she performs as a location for our shoot. She used a combination of digital and film, her preferred medium being film. For the first part of the shoot, we were on one of the terraces. She suggested a simple storyline, a woman waiting for someone, maybe her lover, who never comes, or perhaps she is starting out on a journey full of hope and then gives in.
There is a lot you can imagine here, the photographs give a suggestion of a story, you the viewer can fill in the gaps. The first images show a bold woman. The final pictures in the series show a dejected, broken woman, finally falling asleep on the dirty floor, in complete disarray. I no longer have the final image, but here you can see the preceding one, which clearly conveys the sense of being deserted, abandoned, rejected and feeling hopeless.
But when it comes to stories created around photographs, nothing will beat the wonderful narrative by Daniela aka drop-asd on deviantArt in one of her early pieces. She took an image of me from 2008, an art nude with then, now photographer, Cidy - I am not able to show the picture here, but it can be seen on deviantArt and wrote:
"This photo shows a sad love story between an elderly woman who was a brilliant writer and a young boy who delivered her supplies from the local store. They fell in love, but neither his parents nor her children from her first marriage approved so they had to leave the country and move to Spain. Unfortunately, their plane crashed. There were no survivors, but the two lovers died in each other's arms."
I don't think I have ever laughed so much in a long time. The story behind that picture, from my point of view - thus another narrative - is as follows. I wanted to do a shoot that would explore the relationship of an older woman with a younger man and chose the model, Cidy. The photographer, a gifted amateur, who at the time was a close friend, and very much into realistic representation, was not convinced it would work because "there was no truth" - Cidy and I were not even friends, we had only met once to discuss the shoot. On the day of the shoot, the photographer and I had a massive row about the concept, and he wanted to cancel the shoot. I pleaded he should not cancel because Cidy had already left home and was on his way to the studio. When Cidy arrived, he found himself right in the middle of the row. During the shoot, the photographer and I continued arguing, Cidy wanted to get out of the studio as quickly as possible. Eventually, we got a series of shots which showed immense discomfort. And that became the title of the best of those shots, "The discomfort of intimacy."
The point of all this is that to convey a narrative, you need images, but also a few, well-chosen words. Captions and titles are necessary and, like I said, these days you also need hashtags.
Mekita Rivas, in her article, sums it all up: "Be both illustrative and informative when writing photo captions." Excellent advice.
(this is a revised version of an earlier post from 2010 which is no longer available)
I once did a shoot with photographer David Nuttall, with whom I used to work a lot when I first started modelling. When he sent me the images from that shoot I was reading Jungian analyst Layton Schapira and her description of the Cassandra woman:
"What the Cassandra woman sees is something dark and painful that may not be apparent on the surface of things, or that objective facts do not corroborate. She may envision a negative or unexpected outcome; or something which would be difficult to deal with; or a truth which others, especially authority figures, would not accept. In her frightened, ego-less state, the Cassandra woman may blurt out what she sees, perhaps with the unconscious hope that others might be able to make some sense of it. But to them, her words sound meaningless, disconnected and blown out of all proportion."
As I looked at the images, I read all this into one of them, so I entitled it "Cassandra's sorrow" and displayed it with that title on deviantArt - of which I am still a member, ten years on. Neither David nor I was thinking about Cassandra when shooting, the narrative unravelled later. And it is a narrative that fits.
In another shoot I did with Suki Wilde, the story was discussed in advance. Suki is an actress, a model and also a photographer. She brought several props with her, and we used the theatre where she performs as a location for our shoot. She used a combination of digital and film, her preferred medium being film. For the first part of the shoot, we were on one of the terraces. She suggested a simple storyline, a woman waiting for someone, maybe her lover, who never comes, or perhaps she is starting out on a journey full of hope and then gives in.
There is a lot you can imagine here, the photographs give a suggestion of a story, you the viewer can fill in the gaps. The first images show a bold woman. The final pictures in the series show a dejected, broken woman, finally falling asleep on the dirty floor, in complete disarray. I no longer have the final image, but here you can see the preceding one, which clearly conveys the sense of being deserted, abandoned, rejected and feeling hopeless.
But when it comes to stories created around photographs, nothing will beat the wonderful narrative by Daniela aka drop-asd on deviantArt in one of her early pieces. She took an image of me from 2008, an art nude with then, now photographer, Cidy - I am not able to show the picture here, but it can be seen on deviantArt and wrote:
"This photo shows a sad love story between an elderly woman who was a brilliant writer and a young boy who delivered her supplies from the local store. They fell in love, but neither his parents nor her children from her first marriage approved so they had to leave the country and move to Spain. Unfortunately, their plane crashed. There were no survivors, but the two lovers died in each other's arms."
I don't think I have ever laughed so much in a long time. The story behind that picture, from my point of view - thus another narrative - is as follows. I wanted to do a shoot that would explore the relationship of an older woman with a younger man and chose the model, Cidy. The photographer, a gifted amateur, who at the time was a close friend, and very much into realistic representation, was not convinced it would work because "there was no truth" - Cidy and I were not even friends, we had only met once to discuss the shoot. On the day of the shoot, the photographer and I had a massive row about the concept, and he wanted to cancel the shoot. I pleaded he should not cancel because Cidy had already left home and was on his way to the studio. When Cidy arrived, he found himself right in the middle of the row. During the shoot, the photographer and I continued arguing, Cidy wanted to get out of the studio as quickly as possible. Eventually, we got a series of shots which showed immense discomfort. And that became the title of the best of those shots, "The discomfort of intimacy."
The point of all this is that to convey a narrative, you need images, but also a few, well-chosen words. Captions and titles are necessary and, like I said, these days you also need hashtags.
Mekita Rivas, in her article, sums it all up: "Be both illustrative and informative when writing photo captions." Excellent advice.
(this is a revised version of an earlier post from 2010 which is no longer available)
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