Re: untitled

I think that depends as I've run across a lot of "untitled", as it were,
images online and would have loved to know what I was looking at. A recent
good example was a site I saw http://www.lightstalkers.org/ where the photog
galleries have no info at all. Perhaps there's no facility for the
photographers to add titles/descriptions/captions on that site. But often I
am left wanting info about what I'm seeing as opposed to a name for an
image.

But back to your gallery scenario where, we've all seen the opposite where
the title was too wordy, trite or over-done. Some bucolic scene for all
intents doen't need much description or title. A gallery's leaving of an
obligatory space for a title encourages "untitleds" or even worse those
titles that causes one to title when it isn't needed.
To the other extreme, there's the type of work, whether photographic or not,
that the authors feel the need to have a page or two laden with every art
school buzzword to describe what you're looking at, i.e. "This symbolizes a
metaphor of my need to explore environments and emotional states...." oi.
I think my titling needs when viewing are pretty simple; who, what, when,
where, perhaps why, & possibly how as these are the questions that most
readily come to my mind when viewing photography. If asked to title my work
I think I'd be hard pressed to come up with something other than a
description.
e

On 4/7/06, Ryuji Suzuki <rs@silvergrain.org > wrote:
>
> I went to the opening of a show in which one of my print is
> included. There were 95 pieces total, all photographs of various
> material. The average age of this show is by far the lowest in ALL
> group shows I've been selected. (Usually, I'm the youngest or the
> second youngest. This, I felt the opposite.)
>
> You know what, of the 95, 21 were untitled.
>
> This mildly bothers me. I tend to think leaving work untitled is like
> abandoning the right to put a string of words for whatever purpose you
> wish, but more than 1 out of 5 people apparently didn't think so.
>
> Not in relation to this particular show, but the curator of this place
> once said in public "untitled is ok as long as you know which one we
> are talking about when we call you with the jury results."
>
Received on Fri Apr 7 21:40:43 2006