Explaining a Photograph?

If you make photographs as opposed to pictures of things, people will always be asking for explanations. What is the meaning of that photo?

Hopefully I will never write about the meaning of a photograph, at least not one of my own. I think if the photographer can manage an image that appears meaningful, then it should be left up to the viewers to find their own meaning.

But maybe I should be more open to the idea of telling the story of how and/or why a photograph was taken. Does explaining the photograph in that way take away from its mystery? Render it meaningless, or its meaning trite or twee?

Historically, I’ve always been in the “don’t explain” camp, and generally prefer photos with no kind of meaning that can be put into words. I like a good mystery. And I like presenting you with one.

But here I am, writing about photographs, which obviously necessitates using words to talk about photographs. It’s a conundrum.

[interlude in which the author contemplates quitting writing about photography altogether, perhaps retreating to a shady grove to pursue a more silent mind…]

But ultimately, for me at least, writing about photos is like an itch – a verbal storytelling itch that’s hard not to scratch. The writer me is in conflict with the photographer me. We are at cross purposes. It’s a contretemps. Today, writer me wins the battle.

Photojournalism is somewhat different than regular photography. The photo at the top of this article, for example, is not photojournalism. I guess one could call it an art photograph, but I prefer to call that kind of image simply a “photograph.”

With photojournalism, the meaning of a photograph should be fairly obvious as it is presented within the context of a story, usually a story someone else is telling, and it is relatively easy to explain. The above photo of the Tribute to the Ancestors, for example, is from an annual event at Coney Island Beach where people remember and honor the victims of the Middle Passage, those who died horrible deaths crossing the Atlantic on slave ships. Once you know that, the meaning of the photo is self-evident. And the explanation as well. The subjects are looking out to sea, thinking about those who died.

That doesn’t mean that photojournalism is just pictures of things. A good photojournalist goes beyond the straight visual documentation of an event and conveys something of its feeling, but that’s a different story, for a different essay.

That photojournalistic way of explaining a photograph is not the only way to explain one. There is also the photographer’s story of how the picture was taken. Not with what camera or at what lens or what speed or what f-stop, but the how and why the photographer came to do the work.

So if you like the mystery of these images, you might want to stop reading now. Or let’s see. Will the mundane explanation of how these photographs were captured really remove the mystery from the final images? Or can we have two stories at once without one ruining the other?

This is another photo from the same series as the black and white one at the top.

Once upon a time, when my son Jack was four and I was living a life of blissful unemployment, my daughter was in an outside-of-regular-school program at a school in the upper west side. So every Wednesday, I’d pick Jack up from pre-school and we’d have 2-3 hours to kill before having to get to the 91st Street to pick up Chloe. Most weeks we’d go to the American Museum of Natural History, the Dinosaur Museum for short. We developed a plan to spend time in one specific exhibit each week to study it more closely, and eventually visit every single one. We probably came close. It’s a big place but we went most weeks for an entire school year. Good times. After finishing with whatever exhibit we were studying, we’d either go to the kid’s hands-on area, or to the Hall of the Sea until the museum closed.

The Hall of the Sea was no doubt plenty educational, but it was also where all the rich kid’s nannyies ended up hanging out at the end of the day, so there were usually 15 or 20 pre-kindergarteners running around, and I mean that literally, they were running around in circles, and Jack was more than happy to be one of them.

I’d usually sit in front of a large video screen that ran a movie about the evolution of life in the sea. At some point, I noticed that when the kids ran in front of it, they made cool silhouettes. I had a little Canon point and shoot I carried at the time and I had Jack spin around in front of the screen to capture weird motion against the backdrop of the film.

That’s what you are looking at. My four-year-old spinning around in front of a big screen movie at the Dinosaur Museum. That’s the explanation. Now you know. These photos hare essentially meaningless.

So did the explanation detract from the experience of viewing the photograph? Would you rather not have known? Are they really meaningless, or do they still retain their mystery?

Or what?

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All photographs © Michael Webster