it's only words

For the last few weeks, I’ve been attending some seminars on how to write about your work. I felt it was really important to attend these because of the point of change I’m at with my practice right now. Engaging with these sessions has made me realise that words are really going to be the key and the answer to everything I need to know about what I’m going to do, and also how I am going to do it - funding applications, open call applications, etc.

But as I’ve listened to the seminars and taken all of the information in, a long-brewing frustration has popped up again. Now, I know that this is not a unique-to-photography experience, and that all art relies on words to be explained, but sometimes it feels like no other medium relies on writing more than photography.

This has always fascinated me. The specifics in which one has to go into when writing about photography seem incomparable to the way other work is written about. How is it that the most ‘accessible’ medium - in that it is through photographs that a lot of people regularly experience the world, or is the medium that most people are able to dabble in with relative ease - needs the most explaining? I have often wondered as well if the one thing that makes photography ‘art’ at all is the piece of text that sits on the wall of the gallery beside it. Because of photography being this accessible thing, is it the ability to write like that what actually makes it be seen as art?

There is a Barthes essay (I think it’s in Rhetoric of the Image; I’m not going to pretend to be smart and remember anything more than that about it) about a pasta advertisement that I remember being shown really early on in my education. I don’t actually fully remember the ins and outs of it all (and again, won’t pretend to), but I think it was meant to be a tentative introduction to the importance of writing to accompany photographs. What I do remember is being kind of blown away and almost annoyed that such a 'simple' image came with so much writing, and how we were asked to write even more about it. Like, how is that even possible, what does it mean, and why is it necessary?

I catch myself doing it though, walking into a gallery and spending as much, if not more time reading the text on the wall than actually looking at the images. I want to be told what I am supposed to think or feel, instead of experiencing the work and figuring that out myself. I think a lot about the open calls I submit to, and if it is the images that are actually looked at first, or is it the text? I wonder if making beautiful, technically great images matters if the text isn’t good? I equally wonder if the images don’t need to be that good if they are backed up with a really, really good text. Sometimes it feels like I see examples of this all. the time.

Musing on this relationship between text and image is absolutely nothing new, and I am not bringing any new thoughts to the table here. I’m not even fully sure what my thoughts on all of this actually are. But I am interested in why these seminars will culminate in us participants being tasked to write a new version of our artist statements. It feels like a strange conclusion - like the answer to all these discussions about the tension between words and images is just... more words. They don't even know if ours might already be great. Maybe some of us don’t need a new statement, or maybe the problem isn’t the writing itself but the pressure to justify everything we make. It makes me question whether the emphasis on articulating our work through words is overshadowing the visual experience itself (even though I did willingly sign up for these seminars… so really, what did I expect? Still, the whole thing is making me think about how much we’re asked to explain, and whether that expectation is always a good thing. Leave me alone!!!)

It’s strange to think that something so visual can be so dependent on words. The more I think about it, the more inevitable it seems - like the act of taking a photograph and the act of explaining it were always tangled together, whether we like it or not. Maybe photography is always going to sit in this space between what is seen and what is said, never quite existing as one without the other. Maybe the text doesn’t just justify the image but becomes part of it - another layer, another texture, another way of looking. And if that’s the case, maybe photography isn’t as purely visual as we like to think it is. Maybe it was always just as much about language as it is about light.

PS. That Bee Gees song was the soundtrack of writing this blogpost. I feel the same way about the Bee Gees as Rupaul does.