I am a member of a camera club. I won't mention which one because I don't want anyone to get the wrong idea: I like my camera club but there are some things about camera clubs in general that annoy me. I sometimes discuss them with other members but I want to set out one of them here, especially in the light of some things that happened in the last few days.
Up to about twelve years ago I was a member of another camera club, about a hundred miles away from my current one. Our established members were adamant that in our internal competitions the judge should not know the title of the photo he or she was judging. Photographs had titles but they were simply to allow the competition secretary to communicate with the photographer which image he wanted for some later competition.
This feeling was so entrenched that when we visited another club for an external competition and titles were read out, you could see our members' jaws drop.
Now, my current club takes what is maybe the more common approach, that the judge always knows the title of an image when judging it. I don't have a problem with a photograph having a title, as already mentioned, it's useful for identifying it if nothing else. I don't even have a problem in principle with judges knowing the titles, and I certainly don't object to titles being read out after images have been judged. My problem is that judges try to judge titles.
I have heard, and have some sympathy with the counter argument that a title may enhance the photograph. My gut instinct is that a photograph should stand up on its own in competition, but I still understand that counter. The problem is that I know there's more to why I feel strongly about the matter and I have difficulty explaining it. My aim here is to explore it from a number of different angles.
Types of title
Let's look first of all at the types of title an image may have. I won't manage to cover everything but I hope to mention the main types.
The factual title
This is pretty self-explanatory; it's a title which tells you what you're seeing, such as:
- The Eiffel Tower
- Ford Escort
- Blackbird
- Fox
This sort of title is pretty utilitarian. It can avoid confusion I suppose; the judge will know, for example that this is the The Eiffel Tower and not Blackpool Tower, but I ask whether it really matters. Shouldn't the image stand up on its own, whatever the subject actually is?
At the very least you would think such a title was harmless, but no such luck. The worst mistake you can make of course is to get the factual titles wrong and find the judge knows more than you; or worse, get it right and find the judge thinks he knows better than you. Was that car a Ford Prefect or a Ford Anglia?
But there are even more subtle issues. Sometimes the subject of the photograph doesn't have to be large in the frame, so you may have a very minimalist image with a long sweeping horizon broken only by the small silhouette of a horse, so you call the image "Horse", and the judge says your photo is more of a landscape than a picture of a horse. All you wanted to do was draw his attention to the point, in your mind, of the image; you might as well not have bothered.
There are several sub-types of the factual title. In some circumstances natural history photographs are expected to be given as a title the scientific name of the subject:
- Amanita Muscaria
- Eudyptes Pachyrynchus
This is certainly appropriate in a specialist competition but it will leave most generalist judges reeling.
Then there's the special type which is the studio portrait:
- Melanie
- Kate
- Jim
So, you're telling me it's the name of the model but is it really? It might be but then again it might not, and why should I care? This title is irrelevant.
The boasting title
Maybe this also should be a subset of the factual title but it has a special place in my heart. I'm not sure I can think of examples that do it justice:
- Prince Charles falling over
- The rarest bird in the world
- Taken while balancing on a one legged stool hanging over a precipice
What I'm getting at here is not that I mind knowing that you've caught a rare subject as in the first and second cases; yes, it's interesting but, and even more so with the third case, it doesn't enhance the photograph that it was so difficult. You can take the most difficult photograph in the world and it may not be as good as the next chap's quick snap with his camera phone taken from his living room window when the light just happened to be perfect.
I like to think that the best photographs are like magic tricks (ever seen Penn and Teller?), however easy or difficult they may be to achieve, the effort should not show in the final result, it should just impress the viewer by the emotion it gives them.
The poetic title - the "clever" title
I have to admit, I like this sort of thing myself, but it's really not safe to present to a judge. One that I actually used a long time ago was of a yacht on Lake Geneva under a leaden sky. Now, Lake Geneva's French name is Lac Léman. Léman. The meaning of the name is lost in the mists of time (Roman and Celtic) but you have to admit it sounds a bit like "lemon", which of course is limon in French but let's not allow that to get in the way. The leaden sky indicates that there's a storm on the way. So, I gave the image the title "Storm in a Léman Teacup". OK, that's a bit obscure but it makes my point.
Whether the title is a clever play on words, a quotation, or whatever, I would hope it makes you think, and at worst is harmless, but the unthinking judge, not getting the "joke" or reference, will allow the title to negatively affect his marking of the image. Just because he doesn't understand it... what?
The abstract title
This is another one I like, in some ways. The sort of thing I'm thinking of is:
- Solitude
- Despair
- Joy (the emotion, not the girl's name)
The good thing about such titles is they might make the viewer think about the image in a different way. The bad thing, in my opinion, is that the viewer might not agree. Let's give a blatant example. We have a photograph of a fox hunter holding up a dead fox and looking happy. We could call it "triumph"; even if you don't like fox hunting you can't disagree that that is what the guy on the horse is feeling but you might think it ought to be called "inhumanity" or something similar. In my book the image has done something amazing in generating emotion in the viewer but why should the photographer suffer for having incorrectly guessed the viewer's reaction?
The non-title
Being anti-title as I am I spent a whole year giving my competition entries non-titles. As it happens I identified them by the file name that came out of the camera: "IMGP6467", for example. I could equally have chosen "Untitled" though that wouldn't have helped with identification, so how about "Untitled 32"?I thought this was a reasonable way to try to get judges to think for themselves. Some may have done so but many complained that the image had no title (unlike all the others). Where's your imagination? make one up if you need one. But there was a worse type of judge... the one that tried to make sense of "IMGP6467" as a title... laugh, I cried!
I could go on for ages but I want to get round to some actual examples.
RWA
Last weekend I visited the Royal West of England Academy's open Exhibition. I don't go to many art exhibitions but I like the eclectic nature of this one, I enjoy many of the works, and I like to set myself free from the restrictions of camera club competitions for a while.
As I walked round the exhibition there were plenty of "Untitled" works and some with quite impenetrable titles. It's clear that entries don't get "marked down" based on their titles. I took away two examples. I am not criticising the artists here and in fact if you've read what I wrote above you should realise that but they do illustrate some important points.
Imagine a small painting or drawing, hung too high for me to see all the detail, so bear with my vagueness. In the foreground and middle-ground there are a number of figures. In the background there are some distant buildings. The figures are casting fairly long shadows. The title of the image is "Midday".
If I were a camera club judge who thought I knew something, I might smell a rat. How can there be long shadows at midday? Impossible, mark it down! Wait a minute. Isn't that a challenge? Let's see if we can work out why the artist has given it this title? The buildings in the background look a little exotic (I can't see the detail), maybe Asian? Well, that might put the image near the equator, which would make long shadows at midday impossible, so mark it down! Wooah! What if they are buildings in northern Russia and it's spring or autumn, the sun could be quite low even at midday. This could be the explanation or maybe it isn't. Maybe you can think of another, or maybe you will just give the artist the benefit of the doubt, that he or she had a good reason for the title.
Now image another image. It's of an old-looking flat-bed lorry in some disrepair. It has worn writing on the cab: something about Bristol. The title of the image is "Abandoned 1960's lorry", but wait a minute, the lorry has a number plate; it's hanging off, but it's still attached by one end. The number plate is clearly "T-Reg", that's 1978 or 1979. OK, so you can have personalised numbers, but the rule in the UK is that a vehicle can never have a registration that is newer than the vehicle, so the lorry cannot possibly be from the 1960s. That gives me a problem. However much I like the image, I don't think I could own it, knowing that the artist misnamed it... unless I could speak to the artist and he or she explained why, but if I were judging it, the title would not affect my judgement in any way.
