Open to interpretation (08/11/08)

One major difference between journalism and art is the way that text is used. It’s not uncommon for photographs presented as fine art to be labelled “Untitled” with little or no caption information. The reason of course is that Art is meant to be experienced, or at least interpreted according to the individual’s personal experience. Too much information directs interpretation, tells the viewer what to think. Conversely, in photojournalism the captions are part of the narrative, crucial for giving context to the image. It could be said that the caption illustrates the image the way the image illustrates the story. In our bastard genre of “documentary style” art, text is often minimized. In The Americans, brief titles for each photograph were placed at the back of the book (just to identify where the photographs were taken). In Let Us Now Praise Famous Men, Walker Evans and James Agee took the radical approach of placing all of the photographs at the beginning of the book, before the title page, without any captions or other textual information. The statement was that photographs could and can stand on their own as part of the documentary narrative: the purely visual is as informational as descriptive writing. 

The image here was taken yesterday on Broadway St.. I’d be interested to hear some of your interpretations.