Why do we need titles?

I wrote this post sometime in 2014. I have no idea why I didn't publish it at the time. The only reason I mention it is because it refers to events in the recent past, which are now at least 9 months old.

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.

Sex, sex, sex

This is a post I wrote some time ago for another blog. I'm still quite pleased with it...

"Gender" is a perfectly good word. It is a linguistic construct which in many languages happens to be categorised as masculine and feminine (and sometimes neuter). There is no reason it should not be categorised by shape or colour and there may be languages that do so.

"Sex" is also a perfectly good word. It is a biological construct which is usually categorised as male and female.

It annoys me when "Gender" is used as a euphemism for "sex". No euphemism is required for that word, and if it were I am sure we could come up with something less confusing.

While I'm on the difference between "gender" and "sex", I'll touch on the use of pronouns.

In English we have masculine, feminine and neuter pronouns: "he", "she" and "it" respectively. In theory we could use "it" when we are talking of person of unknown sex, but we don't: it isn't considered polite. We should use "he", the masculine pronoun. It really annoys me when people use "she" for this purpose. Let me give you some examples to explain why it annoys me:

• I saw a footballer today. She was wearing boots.
• I saw a secretary today. He was wearing a suit.
• If you met a traffic warden, what do you think she would be wearing?

In the first two examples, I am talking about people I have seen. I presumably know their sex, and I've intentionally done a bit of sexual stereotype bending in order to make the point.

In the third example, I haven't yet met the person. By using the feminine pronoun "she", I am giving myself a picture that I am going to meet a female traffic warden. This doesn't surprise me, since a reasonable proportion of traffic wardens (in the UK) are female, but it does mean that if I meet a male traffic warden I won't consider the condition of the example to have been met. By replacing "she" with "he" in its non sex-specific sense, any traffic warden, whether male or female, will qualify. This is a matter of language, not of sexual equality. Our language is no more sexist than any other language - a language is not capable of being sexist even though its structure or vocabulary may reflect some historical bias.

I recently studied with the Open University and in some of the courses I found the author stuck permanently to using "she" in examples. I was left imagining a world full of women (incidentally, usually doing fairly menial jobs). I would not have objected to a random sprinkling of "he"s and "she"s, nor would it have caused a problem to have a text full of unspecified "he"s.

Please stop using "gender" where you mean good, old-fashioned "sex" and stop using "she" where you have no need to specify the sex of the person you are talking about.​

Grammar - Part 2 (the false plural)

FIFA World Cup Trophy

Is it just me that gets annoyed when people, and in particular the press, uses a plural verb with a singular noun, or less frequently vice versa?

Of course we are in the middle of the World Cup, so the very worst offences come out all the time. You know the sort of thing. First of all, as a non-football-fan I object to using "England" out of context to mean a team rather than a country... come to that I object to using the term "World Cup" without qualifying it will "football". In fact, it isn't even a cup, it's a trophy, for heaven's sake! However that's beside the point.

A typical statement from the press might be "England are favourites to win the game". Now, in no sense is "England" plural. England is a country (as already stated) but even the "England team" is singular, so it has to be "England is favourite to win the game". What else can it be? On the other hand "England team members play to the end" makes perfect sense: "team members" is plural.

I'll gather some interesting examples here as I find them.. This letter to the Boston Standard manages to get plural for singular and vice versa in one sentence. Perhaps it should go up for some trophy (or should that be cup?). Granted it was written by a reader and not by a staff journalist but it was surely the editor that put this sentence in bold print without correcting it.

"Interesting isn’t it that our county council say that Boston, the county’s second largest town, does not need a bypass, while towns like Crowland in the south of the county has two!"

Grammar - Part 1 (the apostrophe)

As usual when I set up a personal blog, I haven't really been making much use of this one, so I thought I might at least temporarily start posting about grammatical errors I see. I know, everyone does it, but I hope to make it at least slightly interesting.

There is a problem with writing such a blog and that is, what if I don't get my grammar right all the time. Well, I am not perfect in that respect, certainly. My punctuation can be a bit erratic as you may have noticed and I am prone to typographical errors when I'm typing quickly as I am just now.

Motor racing at it's best (sic)

I'll certainly do my best to keep on the straight and narrow but I do think there's a difference between a note to oneself (where grammar doesn't matter), a blog (where people will see it so you should make an attempt to get it right) and, for example, advertising copy (which should have been proof-read to death).

The first and most obvious target is the apostrophe. It seems that superfluous apostrophes, sometimes called greengrocers' apostrophes because they were once almost solely used on A-boards advertising vegetables, have found their way into everywhere that the written word can be found.

This week we are due to go to the Goodwood Festival of Speed. I pointed out to my wife that she may be interested in one of the branded t-shirts but she went off the idea when we found the ones pictured here. I wonder whether Lord March knows about this blunder?

"It is" is contracted to "it's" using an apostrophe. That would make using an apostrophe for the possessive ambiguous, so it's omitted in "its" when it is possessive:

• "Motor racing at its best." but...
• "It's the best motor racing."

Readings largest tanning studio (sic)

Someone today pointed out a rare case of the missing apostrophe. I suppose with all these extra ones around the country we had to find where they'd been stolen from at some point. Here is the second exhibit showing an advert for a tanning salon in Reading.

I'll keep my eye out for interesting cases of the superfluous or missing apostrophe. This is no place for the banal, every day apple's and pear's of the greengrocer's sign.

Cats

Ban domestic cats (in the UK), I say. Keeping them indoors is cruel to cats; letting them out adds an unnatural predator for wildlife, and one that doesn't even usually know what to do once prey has been caught.

This New Zealander has the right idea.

I am fed up with hearing cat owners mourning the death of another wild animal or bird when the solution (or rather the problem) is staring them in the face. I am also fed up of hearing people saying their cat doesn't kill, when it is a predator and they have clearly not followed it everywhere it has gone.

There may be people (on farms for instance) for whom keeping cats is a good solution to a pest problem but mostly the cat is the problem.

Teasers and spoilers

I am no great sports fan. Certainly I like to watch Formula One when I get a chance, and maybe occasionally tennis, athletics and other bits and pieces but I'm not into football and indeed most team games. This means I find it slightly amusing when you get announcements on television like:

"Look away now if you don't want to see the result of the Chelsea versus Arsenal game that will be on Match of the Day after the news"

Yes, I find it amusing and I don't entirely understand it, but I do respect the interest of others in not knowing the score. So what's the problem? It's that broadcasters don't seem to realise that the same enjoyment of suspense can exist for types of programme other than sport.

An obvious recent example (though I would suggest a minor one in many ways) was the way that Peter Capaldi was unveiled as the new Doctor Who with great pomp in August, when his first episode will not air until Christmas. While it could easily be argued that this didn't deserve a programme of its own (which incidentally I didn't watch), and in the (distant) past the first one would know of a new actor in the role would be when the character "regenerated", I don't think the name of the actor is really that important to the series, but rather how he takes on the part and we won't really know that until he is well under-way. The real suspense in this case is in the new episodes, not the actor himself.

No, there are much more serious crimes of spoiling going on every day, whether it's for drama series or for documentaries.

Middle-lane hogging

Taffic on the M1 (linked from the BBC News Magazine)

Today I came across a BBC article Motorway middle-lane hoggers to face on-the-spot fines. It turns out that the proposed fines are not just about middle-lane hogging but about a number of frequently practiced, and arguably "minor" careless driving offences. Predictably though the reader comments mostly focused on the subject in the title. I was even moved to add my own contribution to the comments; something I rarely do.

I have just found another BBC article: Who, what, why: What's wrong with middle-lane hogging? which, in talking to a number of experts and pundits, aims to discover why middle-lane hogging is a bad thing. I think the article is generally reasonable but I don't think it managed to uncover all of the issues.