“When words become unclear, I shall focus with photographs. When images become inadequate, I shall be content with silence.”
- Ansel Adams
Since I started photography I’ve struggled with how much to say in words. What should accompany an image? Do I talk about the technical, mechanical aspects of making a photograph? Do I write about what led me to create that image? Do I discuss the pieces of my internal self that some of these images hint at? Do I hedge, and attach a poem or a song lyric that perhaps couple well? That used to be my go-to on Instagram. I really didn't want to talk about my photos, and so I let the words of others fill in.
I’m reading a fascinating (for photographers at least, I would assume) book right now by Robert Adams called “Why People Photograph.” In one essay he addresses what, most of the photographers I’ve talked to anyway, seem to struggle with: how much do you say about a picture? I was unable to find a copy of that particular essay to link to, however in looking I came across this article from the Guardian, which discusses some of Adams’ points quite well, and if you have a few minutes and the interest, I would recommend it.
If you don’t have the few minutes or the interest then I will leave you, for now, with this excerpt from Adams’ essay, because I believe that it gets at the heart of what I contemplate, and will explain why some of my posts may contain a startlingly small amount of verbiage:
“Part of the reason that these attempts at explanation fail, I think, is that photographers, like all artists, choose their medium because it allows them the most fully truthful expression of their vision. Other ways are relatively imprecise and incomplete. Why try the other ways? As Charles Demuth said, ‘I have been urged… to write about my paintings… Why? Haven’t I, in a way, painted them?’ Or as Robert Frost told a person who asked him what one of his poems meant, ‘You want me to say it worse?’…
“The main reason that artists don’t willingly describe or explain what they produce is, however, that the minute they do so they’ve admitted failure. Words are proof that the vision they had is not, in the opinion of some at least, fully there in the picture. Characterizing in words what they thought they’d shown is an acknowledgement that the photograph is unclear.”