The art of photo captioning
They say a picture is worth a thousand words, but, in the age of social media, does that hold true?
Photobooks, picture books, comics, gallery artworks, social media posts — these are just some of the ways in which images and words appear to us side-by-side, but what is the nature of their relationship? And, honestly, should we be worried?
I recently participated in a collaborative project in which I, with another editor from my Advanced Editing class, were tasked with assisting one of RMIT’s photography students in creating a photobook. As a part of this project, my co-editor and I got to delve into a bit of ghostwriting. The power of invisibility should come naturally to the editorially inclined; as the esteemed Mary Norris put it in her 2015 book Between You and Me: Confessions of a Comma Queen ‘(…)much of copy editing is about not going beyond your province’. If we are not seen nor heard, our job has been done.
The practice of ghostwriting allegedly dates back to the 5th century, when scribes would fabricate the words of royalty. Since then, it has been used to give words to people who cannot articulate them for themselves — or simply don’t have time to. In my circumstances, my co-editor and I were provided dot-points by our photographer that gave us basic information about some of the photos, but the rest was up to us to divine.
Some questions we asked ourselves:
- What does a good photo caption need?
- What does the audience need?
- What captions would assist the photo-narrative, and not be to its detriment?
Our priority was to ensure the story was being told in the most concise and enticing way and so, whilst on a Zoom call, we went through each individual image and brainstormed possible captions. After we had our rough drafts, we fine-tuned them, cutting excessive adjectives, dissecting dangling modifiers, crossing our t’s and dotting our i’s.
But, in the age of social media, what is the power of a photo caption? How might the captions in a printed book differ from the common ones we encounter whilst scrolling through our feeds?
I want you to imagine a painting fixed to a gallery wall. It is immense in size, almost overwhelming. If you know much about art, you might know what it was painted with, or who the artist is. But if you don’t, then a small placard beside it can give you its credentials and, occasionally, context to its creation. But perhaps this is an unfamiliar experience to you, and you’ve never set foot in a gallery. Our current society, perpetually online as it is, is one where we view most images in the palm of our hand, their light projecting onto our corneas. And, often, they are accompanied with their own sort of placard; a caption above or beneath it, depending on the social media platform. And these captions come in many forms: detailed descriptions, copious hashtags, misattributed quotes, and a million ways of shitposting.
But I wonder, what has this done to how we perceive images? With an oversaturation of posts flying past us, can a picture truly tell a thousand words anymore? Or do they all blend together into an overstimulation of the senses, making our social-media-conditioned minds crave more and more until we find ourselves numb to all new experiences? Only the truly extraordinary can stand out in this instance.
Quite a drastic and fatalistic thought, I know. I should probably give us more credit. One of the core beliefs in Gestalt psychology, holism, presents us with the idea that the whole is greater than the sum of its parts. So if we think of the parts as the image itself, the caption and the audience, these things must work synergistically in order to create the narrative.
The image presents us with visual and aesthetic information, and the caption then furthers this by giving context of some form, but it is in the mind of the audience that the story, at last, is fully formed.
The image presents us with visual and aesthetic information, and the caption then furthers this by giving context of some form, but it is in the mind of the audience that the story, at last, is fully formed. There is a quote by novelist Stephen King that asserts: ‘Description starts in the writer’s imagination, but should finish in the readers’. He requests that we reserve ourselves, and allow the audience to participate in conjuring whatever meaning they wish from what is given to them.
Whilst writing our descriptions, there were some photos that we decided were best left standing on their own, which would then leave the audience to do the rest of the work. We made this decision as, amongst the other things we had to consider, we were also managing narrative pacing, and found that any descriptions we gave to these photos felt like information overload. One of the spreads we decided to leave without any caption is pictured below.
A caption must match the tone of the photo — if the image needs more context, it should be provided. But there must be a balance between visual and written information. It is in juggling these competing mediums that we create compelling stories. Because, ultimately, that’s what most art is about — the story. So, as creators and shapers of these endless yarns, it is our responsibility to bring them out in their highest form.
