Photographers displaying fine art photographs, photographs created for display as art, often find themselves stumped for a title. If offering the work for sale online or being show in an art show or gallery, the fine art photographer often falls into the trap of thinking they need some kind of “artsy” title or something with a cute, clever pun.
They will come up with a song lyric or some kind of convoluted art speak title in which a photograph of a building becomes something like “The Power of Mankind” or a photograph of a flower becomes “Force of Nature” or some other kind of nonsense.
The title is not the art.
Good art doesn’t need a title to carry the weight. The title should inform the reader further about what they are seeing but not be a substitute for the actual photograph. If you have to force some kind of overlay of meaning on to the photograph via a poetic title, then the photograph itself is probably a failure.
As they say, the art should speak for itself.
In the world of photography, the best known photographers Edward Weston, Ansel Adams, Diane Arbus etc. would use factual rather than fanciful titles.
You have to go back to the early pictorial work of Alfred Stieglitz (American, 1864–1946) and images like “Equivalent, 1923” – which was basically a photograph of a cloud – to see more poetic titles.
Art Photography was new at the time and just starting to be shown next to paintings and the modern painting at the time was often cubism or abstract artworks that required a bit of help from the title simply to tell one painting from another.
This early photographic work from the pictorial movement with intentional blurs and abstract subjects tried to mimic the paint trends of the time but later photography was simply accepted as its own artform and titles became more informative rather than “artistic”.
Photographers asked to join in a local photography show or trying to sell their work online must feel intiminated by painters, simply are ignorant of the history of fine art photography or just think that a fancy title will somehow elevate their photography from snapshot to fine art.
The worse example I’ve seen was at a photography show at my Mom’s retirement community. There was a photograph of poor African children and the old white guy who snapped it on a cruise had titled the print of the smiling children as “Know a good dentist?” The title gave more information about the photographer than it did the subject.
No fancy, poetic title is going to make a bad photograph better. Give it a straightforward title and if it is any good the photograph will speak for itself.
