Latest / The MOOD Podcast / Stop Explaining Your Photographs - Moments of Mood, 3.9

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Stop Explaining Your Photographs - Moments of Mood, 3.9 · The MOOD Podcast

• 0:00
  Matt: Do you think you should explain your photographs to people, or should you just let them sit there in silence and let the images speak for themselves?
• 0:09
  Matt: And I know this kind of sounds trivial, bit of a small thing, almost probably like a question of manners, but I've actually come to think it's actually one of the more important questions you can ask yourself as a photographer, because buried inside it is this whole problem of how you ever really find out what your work is saying.
• 0:31
  Matt: So that's what I want to get into today in this episode of Moments of Mood.
• 0:35
  Matt: Why the little explanation we all give before someone looks at our image or images and what we all do to it might be costing us the most useful information we can get about our own voice.
• 0:46
  Matt: And I'll give you something to take away in this episode: a way to test all of this on your own work.
• 0:53
  Matt: I'll say now, I do have an opinion on this one.
• 0:55
  Matt: Of course, I think you should stop explaining your photographs.
• 0:59
  Matt: And hopefully by the end of this episode, you'll at least understand why I've landed in that conclusion.
• 1:07
  Matt: This is the Mood Podcast.
• 1:17
  Matt: I am Matt Jacob, and this is the show that helps emerging photographers find their voice so you can build a cohesive body of work, articulate what it's about, and get it in front of the right people.
• 1:30
  Matt: It's really the only photography podcast that is itself a practice.
• 1:34
  Matt: And every week I sit down with you or with a guest and break a single idea in a commentary like this one called Moments of Mood, or discuss the wider goings-on of photography and process within it.
• 1:48
  Matt: So I am sure you've experienced this.
• 1:51
  Matt: You show an image or a selection of images to friends or family, or maybe somewhere a bit more formal, maybe a critique or a workshop, even social media, maybe whatever it is, and what comes back is not necessarily what you've made, or not what you thought you made.
• 2:09
  Matt: Someone sees melancholy in a photograph you took on one of the happiest days you can remember, for example.
• 2:16
  Matt: Or someone asks if a project is about loss when in your head it was always about maybe resilience.
• 2:23
  Matt: And there's that little moment, right, where you feel the correction rising up in you.
• 2:29
  Matt: No, no, no, no.
• 2:30
  Matt: Let me tell you what it's actually about.
• 2:32
  Matt: Let me give you the context and outcomes, the backstory, where you were, what you intended, what they're supposed to be feeling and looking at.
• 2:42
  Matt: We basically repair their reading of it, right?
• 2:44
  Matt: I've done this more times than I could count.
• 2:46
  Matt: And honestly, I still catch myself doing it today.
• 2:50
  Matt: And for years, I thought that was just, well, part of it, part of sharing your work.
• 2:56
  Matt: You know, you share the picture and you explain the picture.
• 2:59
  Matt: A lot of emerging photographers are really wanting text with images or titles to either explain or elevate them somehow.
• 3:06
  Matt: And I see this all the time.
• 3:08
  Matt: It even feels generous, doesn't it?
• 3:11
  Matt: Like you're helping people appreciate it properly.
• 3:14
  Matt: And there's definitely some deep-rooted condescension in there, right?
• 3:17
  Matt: But uh somewhere along the way, for me anyway, I started to suspect that the explaining wasn't really for them.
• 3:25
  Matt: It was more for me.
• 3:26
  Matt: Because if I'm being honest, any little speech before or after someone looks is control.
• 3:32
  Matt: It's me telling them how not to see the picture.
• 3:35
  Matt: It's a fence I put up around all the meanings that I didn't choose and don't really want to be caught holding, right?
• 3:43
  Matt: And the meanings that you didn't choose, the stuff people keep finding in your work that you never put there or never knew you put there, that is very often where your voice actually lies.
• 3:56
  Matt: So I want you to think about it like this.
• 3:58
  Matt: When someone reads your image wrong, what's actually happening here?
• 4:03
  Matt: They're not hallucinating, of course.
• 4:05
  Matt: Uh, maybe in some instances they are, but they're looking at the thing you made without any of the baggage, right?
• 4:11
  Matt: And telling you what it transmits.
• 4:13
  Matt: That's it.
• 4:14
  Matt: And you can't do that for yourself.
• 4:16
  Matt: That's the problem here.
• 4:17
  Matt: That's the catch, because you're the one person in the world who can't see your own work cold.
• 4:23
  Matt: Because you were there, you made it, you're too close, right?
• 4:27
  Matt: You're carrying the memory and experience of all of it, of the day, the effort, the intention.
• 4:32
  Matt: And that memory sits between you and the image, quietly coloring everything, not even really noticing that that's there.
• 4:41
  Matt: Because you're part of it, part of the subject, part of the story.
• 4:45
  Matt: And a stranger doesn't have any of that, right?
• 4:47
  Matt: So they're reading, even when it stings, maybe, especially when it stings, actually, is information you literally cannot get anywhere else.
• 4:56
  Matt: And it's so valuable.
• 4:58
  Matt: You can't get it from a course or from a mentor telling you what works, and not from staring at your own archive incessantly for another year.
• 5:06
  Matt: And I'll tell you why sharing your work in the first place, something many, many photographers are incredibly daunted by, is such a useful exercise.
• 5:16
  Matt: Because when the same wrong reading keeps coming back from different people and multiple people at different times, that's not noise anymore.
• 5:26
  Matt: That's a pattern.
• 5:27
  Matt: That's the work telling you something about yourself that you haven't yet caught up with.
• 5:33
  Matt: Because your voice was never just the things that you consciously chose, right?
• 5:39
  Matt: A huge part of it, maybe most of it, is the stuff that keeps walking into your frames uninvited unconsciously.
• 5:46
  Matt: The moods, the preoccupations, and the same quiet note showing up year after year, archive after archive, while your captions keep pointing everyone somewhere else.
• 5:57
  Matt: And there's often a big disconnect.
• 5:59
  Matt: Now, an example here: Winnegrand.
• 6:02
  Matt: Gary Winnegrant.
• 6:04
  Matt: He understood this maybe better than anyone.
• 6:08
  Matt: He had this line that he photographed to find out what things would look like photograph.
• 6:14
  Matt: I absolutely love that.
• 6:17
  Matt: Now, just sit with that for a while.
• 6:20
  Matt: The first time you hear that, it sounds a bit like a riddle, almost a joke, right?
• 6:26
  Matt: But just sit with it again.
• 6:27
  Matt: Sit with it for a moment because he wasn't going out with a message and using the camera to deliver that message.
• 6:35
  Matt: What he was doing was photographing to be told something in return.
• 6:40
  Matt: He also used to insist that a photograph isn't the thing it shows.
• 6:45
  Matt: It's its own object, it's its own fact.
• 6:47
  Matt: It behaves in its own way.
• 6:49
  Matt: And if that's true, and I think it is, then your photograph is fully capable of saying things that you never intended.
• 6:56
  Matt: The only question is whether you ever shut up and get out of your own way long enough to hear it.
• 7:04
  Matt: And I'll speak for myself here.
• 7:06
  Matt: Some of the most useful things I now know about my own work, the threads I actually edit towards these days, I didn't find them.
• 7:16
  Matt: Other people did.
• 7:17
  Matt: They found them in readings that I wanted to correct at the time.
• 7:22
  Matt: And it took me embarrassingly long to realize that my own explanations weren't protecting the photographs, but more like protecting me from the photographs.
• 7:34
  Matt: There's a passage in a book I've been reading called Art and Fear by David Bales and Ted Orland that I keep coming back to on this.
• 7:44
  Matt: They write that making art provides uncomfortably accurate feedback about the gap that inevitably exists between what you intended to do and what you actually did.
• 7:56
  Matt: And I love that, partly because it's so unsentimental about it.
• 8:00
  Matt: That gap is there for all of us, every time.
• 8:03
  Matt: The photograph you planned in your head and the photograph that actually came back, they're never quite the same animal, are they?
• 8:11
  Matt: But notice that is a different gap from the one we've actually been talking about.
• 8:17
  Matt: That's the gap between your intention and what you actually did, right?
• 8:22
  Matt: The other one is the gap between what you intended and how a viewer interprets it.
• 8:28
  Matt: So there are two of them.
• 8:30
  Matt: And every photograph you've ever shown anyone has probably crossed both.
• 8:35
  Matt: Your intention, then the thing you actually made, then the thing they experienced as well.
• 8:41
  Matt: Three points with two gaps.
• 8:43
  Matt: And we as photographers spend our whole lives trying to shrink them, right?
• 8:48
  Matt: We get more skilled so the picture comes out to closer to what we saw in our head.
• 8:54
  Matt: And then we explain or we write, we caption or contextualize so the viewer ends up closer to what we actually meant and intended.
• 9:04
  Matt: So what happens if you actually succeed in closing these gaps?
• 9:08
  Matt: Imagine both gaps close to nothing.
• 9:10
  Matt: Your skill and vision is perfect.
• 9:13
  Matt: So the photograph is exactly what you intended, your contextual and narrative framing is perfect as well.
• 9:19
  Matt: So the viewer receives exactly what you meant.
• 9:22
  Matt: Is that the masterpiece, or is that the most boring photograph ever made?
• 9:28
  Matt: Or the most boring series?
• 9:30
  Matt: Because a picture like that or pictures like that have nothing left to discover.
• 9:35
  Matt: There's no room in it for the viewer to bring themselves and their own perceptions, own experiences.
• 9:40
  Matt: No space for the misreadings that, as we've just said, might be where your voice actually lives.
• 9:46
  Matt: Nothing for the image to say back to you that you didn't already know.
• 9:50
  Matt: It's a closed loop.
• 9:52
  Matt: And I wonder, honestly, whether some of the photographs that have meant the most to me have meant that much precisely because the gaps were open.
• 10:03
  Matt: Because the photographer did something that they didn't fully intend.
• 10:08
  Matt: And I saw something they never planned for me to see.
• 10:12
  Matt: And the picture was big enough to hold all three of us.
• 10:16
  Matt: So maybe a successful photograph isn't the one that bridges the distance at all.
• 10:21
  Matt: Maybe it's the one that makes the distance worth standing in.
• 10:25
  Matt: I don't know.
• 10:26
  Matt: But it does make you wonder uh whether all of this explaining, all this managing of the viewer's experience is just us trying to stand out from the noise, add some kind of uniqueness to the pictures, and to close the exact gap that art needs to actually stay alive.
• 10:45
  Matt: Quick thing here before we finish these thoughts.
• 10:48
  Matt: Everything I'm describing needs other people, needs eyes that weren't there.
• 10:54
  Matt: And it needs you to stay quiet while they look, which is genuinely hard to do.
• 10:59
  Matt: Much harder than it sounds, of course, and almost impossible to practice alone.
• 11:04
  Matt: That's what the mood insiders is.
• 11:07
  Matt: It's my photography community and it's a room where you hand over work with no framing, and people tell you what it actually carries, not necessarily how it performed.
• 11:17
  Matt: The scoreboard's off.
• 11:18
  Matt: And if you're curious about what your photographs say when you're not standing next to them, then this is definitely the place to find out.
• 11:26
  Matt: Links in the description, and I hope to see you inside.
• 11:30
  Matt: Now, am I saying context is worthless, that artists' statements are nonsense and you should never talk about your work.
• 11:39
  Matt: No, actually the opposite.
• 11:41
  Matt: It's about invitation and articulation rather than offerings and explanations in people's faces.
• 11:48
  Matt: I think there's a real difference between explaining an image and articulating a body of work.
• 11:54
  Matt: And the difference is mostly about timing.
• 11:57
  Matt: Explaining happens usually before the seeing.
• 12:00
  Matt: It's kind of defensive.
• 12:02
  Matt: It's about protecting one frame from being misread.
• 12:06
  Matt: Now, articulating comes after the seeing, after a lot of seeings, and it's something you earn.
• 12:12
  Matt: It's being able to say what the whole body of work is about, or maybe just an image.
• 12:17
  Matt: And you can't actually do that honestly until you know what the work transmits on its own, which means the misreadings aren't the enemy of articulation.
• 12:27
  Matt: They're the raw material for it.
• 12:30
  Matt: Silence first, words later.
• 12:32
  Matt: And the words end up better for the weight because now they describe the work that exists, not the work you meant to make.
• 12:40
  Matt: And that second part, articulation, how you actually talk about your body of work, that's a whole conversation on its own.
• 12:48
  Matt: And we'll get into that in another video entirely.
• 12:52
  Matt: But it's a topic that is probably the most important thing no one actually talks about when wanting to circulate a body of work.
• 13:00
  Matt: So back to that moment that we started with.
• 13:03
  Matt: Someone is looking at your photographs, they've got it wrong, should we say?
• 13:08
  Matt: And you can feel the correction coming up in your chest and you want to correct them, right?
• 13:12
  Matt: I know I feel it.
• 13:14
  Matt: And I don't think this is something you graduate from anytime soon.
• 13:18
  Matt: Staying silent while someone reads your work is exposing, it's vulnerable, even after years of doing it.
• 13:24
  Matt: But those few seconds, that's where the real education is.
• 13:27
  Matt: That's where the gold is.
• 13:29
  Matt: Because every misreading is someone holding up a mirror to a part of your seeing that you can't access on your own.
• 13:36
  Matt: And the photographers that I've watched grow the fastest and become most successful, they're not the ones with the most thorough explanations.
• 13:45
  Matt: They are the ones who learn to stand in that silence and uncertainty and actually take notes before landing on an articulation that delivers in those gaps.
• 13:58
  Matt: So go and ask yourself the harder questions we opened up earlier.
• 14:03
  Matt: And of course, please let me know what you think.
• 14:06
  Matt: Would you actually want those gaps I talked about closed?
• 14:10
  Matt: Would you rather everyone have the information, all of it?
• 14:12
  Matt: Or is the distance between what you meant, what you made, and what they saw, is that where the interesting stuff really happens?
• 14:20
  Matt: I'm not sure the goal was ever to be perfectly understood with all this.
• 14:25
  Matt: So show the work in silence, let it be misread, and listen to what comes back.
• 14:30
  Matt: Happy shooting.