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Walker Evans, from Let Us Now Praise Famous Men 1935/41. No caption. |
Anchorage and RelayPhotography and Textpage two Roland Barthes (1997) referred to the concepts of Anchorage and Relay when considering the interplay between text and images. A caption or title provides a link, some form of relevance to the image. This is the anchor. It could be argued, then, that providing an anchor also influences the understanding of the image's meaning in the mind if the viewer, which can be used to effect if that is the photographer's intent, but that it also has the effect of restraining interpretation. Writing in the context of journalism, Hall (1981) goes so far as to say of anchorage that "It is a very common practice for the captions to news photographs to tell us, in words, exactly how the subject's expression ought to be read." This is powerful yet dangerous. An historical example might be found in the the book Let Us Now Praise Famous Men, in which Walker Evan's photographs of poverty-stricken sharecroppers were supplemented with prose written by James Agee, designed to make the reader empathise with the plight of the subjects. However, the images and the text were separate: Evans believing that his photographs should be self-explanatory; by adding words the image could somehow be seen as deficient. Returning to Barthes, text can also act as a relay - a form of reciprocity between the wording and the image where one feeds and supports the other. This is what I hope to have achieved with the Working Late series. How else could my photographs be interpreted? It is possible that they could be architectural images meant to promote a particular style or advertise luxurious office space, or perhaps they could simply be an exercise on night-photography, but the addition of specifically chosen texts gives the images a distinct purpose as they work in relay with the extracts to explore the Working Late phenomenon of modern day living. Useful texts: Barthes, R. Image-Music-Text. London: Fontana 1977 Becker, K E. Photojournalism and the Tabloid Press in: Wells, L (Ed.) The Photography Reader. pub Routledge 2003. pp302-5 for a discussion on the use if texts in newspapers and how text and photographs interrelate generally. Evans, W and Agee, J. Let Us Now Praise Famous Men pub. Houghton Mifflin Co., Boston 1941 - 2001. Goddard, A. The Language of Advertising. Routledge, 1998. Hall, S. The Determinations of News Photographs. In Cohen, Stanley & Jock Young (Eds.) The Manufacture of News: Social Problems, Deviance and the Mass Media. London: Constable 1981 pp226-43. Webster, F. The New Photography: Responsibility in Visual Communication. London and New York: Riverrun Press, 1980. Wells, L. On and Beyond the White Walls: Photography as Art. in: Wells. L. (Ed.) Photography, A Critical Introduction. 3rd. Edition pub. Routledge 2003. pp279-280. URLs: (Sites accessed and live 26/11/05) 'Working late' websites. With full acknowledgement to the authors, whose permission to use extracts has been sought: |
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(C) Helen Williams 2005 |
