Text and Photography: Never the twain shall meet?

Reading the Adams piece was a rather visceral experience for me, as an artist myself who has had to write about my own work for public perusal. Writing about your own artwork is a chore. Often, you aren't sure what your original intention was, or if it even has any relevance to the work you produced. Perhaps you did not start out with an intention and developed content in the production process. Or you may want to leave a piece vague and ambiguous so that the audience can read into it what they will.

And this is fine. Artwork does not always require text - magazines, newspapers, and other mass media flood us with images that very well speak for themselves, and the text only serves to fill in the details or tell what is happening outside the scene. However, art sometimes does require text - either to enlarge its content or to provide a context so that the viewer can locate themselves within a piece. This text does not need to be entirely explicit about the artist's intentions - it can meerly state where the piece, who or what it is of, or how the artist came across the particular subject. As mundane as this information may seem, it can completely explode what a piece of artwork is, while still allowing a viewer to read their own narrative into the work.

Additionally, I have been trained to find visual cues in an image and read meaning into them. I can develop elaborate stories about images I know nothing about. But, for the general public, this activity may not come so easily. A person that is not familiar with artist motifs or art history may find an image powerful, but still be at a loss as to why they are drawn to it and are thus denied the full experience of appreciating an image. By denying context to these viewers, and insisting that art can only be appreciated by artists, is a disappointingly elitist stance and one that I am vehemently opposed to.

Adams may not entirely devalue text, but it seems as if he has not fully explored the manner in which it can be utilized to enrich an image. Perhaps he should go talk to someone who is not an artist once in a while.

Concerning the small portion of the documentary that we viewed last night, I was most struck by the comodification of artists and their photographs, particularly in the way that some images can sell for elaborate sums but during the artist's time their work was completely undervalued. It seems as if antiquity and distance give photographs their value, displacing them from their context and elevating mediocre images into expensive masterpieces (not to say any of the images in the film were mediocre). It was also strange to see the artist at the end of the film, who created his style and intention in his native land, but was then appropriated to a high class New York audience, completely removed from the people he was photographing, and in the end turned into a fashion trend. Once again, it seems the distance and exotic nature of the artist was what gave his images such appeal.