Finding Titles for Creative Work
Struggling to title your photographs? This post offers practical tips to craft meaningful titles that elevate your work.
I can be a terrible procrastinator.
Monday comes around, as it does every week, and I sit scrolling through my photographs looking for the next one for a writing prompt.
Usually, I can select one with ease. Not because I think all my pictures are amazing, far from it. These days I've learnt to trust my instincts when it comes to photographs. I've taken enough in my life to know the better ones when I'm looking at a selection on paper or a screen. They pop out as if waving wildly in a team line-up. Pick me! Pick me! Pick me!
Then there are the ones where I thought, 'This is going to be a goodie', and I take frame after frame after frame and still the right shot eludes me.
It's a strange beast, photography.
Once I have my picture, I need a title. I flick through notebooks, leaf through a dictionary, type words into an online thesaurus all the while trying to think but not think. Because often when I try and conjure up a title nothing appears. Yet when I'm standing at the kitchen sink rinsing out some stinking, moulding yoghurt pot or swilling water around an empty tin with a razor-sharp edge, words appear in my head. They float in, settle for a time and then disappear.
Why is that? Why do ideas come to you when you're in the shower, driving the car, sitting on a bus? But when you sit and concentrate...nothing...zero...nil.
For the photograph above I wasn't happy with my first title - the imaginative Sunset. I’m guilty of titling in simple terms, pointing out the obvious. This can work but I think it's better to put a bit more effort in.
The title Untitled annoys me. I find an untitled piece of work disconnecting. I don’t agree with those that say Untitled is a title in itself. It feels as if the artist is up in front of my face stopping me from joining in the conversation, waving me away. I believe a proper title respects the artwork, provides further points for conversation, gives the viewer a helping hand into the artwork.
A good title frames the work, conceptually speaking. I don't think it’s enough for an artist to say their work 'speaks for itself'. I don't understand why it has to. Art reflects the world we live in. The best art gives those less fortunate a voice or challenges preconceptions or is beautiful and brings enormous joy and humour.
A film has a title. Novels have titles. People have names. Dogs have names. Songs have titles. Poems are often titled. A title is a tiny clue for you and me, to find our way into the artwork. We bring our culture, upbringing, religious views, life philosophy, birthplace, parents, everything. To me giving your art piece the title Untitled is at best unimaginative, at worst lazy.
Give that piece of art you worked so hard on a bit more effort and you'll find it connects with many more people.
So. There I am, staring at a picture I took back in 2019, drinking more coffee, hoping the caffeine will deliver an epiphany.
It doesn't.
My mind wanders to the question of how a sunset occurs in the first place. I find the answer within a few minutes - what a wonderful place the internet can be.
At sunrise or sunset, the sun is close to the horizon and sunlight has a greater distance to travel to earth. Dust, pollutants and other particles in the atmosphere are also at their most dense closer to the earth. The longer distance and dense atmosphere combine to scatter the shorter wavelengths of blue, violet and green light away from the earth while the longer wavelengths of red and yellow light make it through.
And there it was. I'd found my title. A Longer Wavelength.
Read a deeper easy-to-read explanation on sunsets here
Post first published in 2021, edited in 2024 for a better read. Photo by Tanya Clarke, Tofino 2019, title: A Longer Wavelength
