What’s in a Title – a Personal View By Paul Whitham LPSNZ
One of the many skills you have to learn when submitting images for exhibitions or assessments is how to title your image. Unless you are entering images in natural history/wildlife sections, you are pretty much free to title them any way you like. Prior to the 18th century, most artworks were not titled because a work was commissioned and was a “oneoff”. Therefore, neither the artist nor the buyer needed a title. But as art began to be traded and reproduction methods improved, there was a need to identify individual images, so artists started to title their works. In viewing an image, there is almost a chicken/egg debate as to whether to look at the title and then the work or the other way around. Complicating it further, some assessors ignore titles altogether. This is generally because they either believe the image should stand on its own, or they don’t want the title affecting their perception of the image. That is not to say that the title the artist gives a work sticks. James McNeill Whistler named his most famous painting Arrangement in Grey and Black, No. 1: Portrait of the Painter’s Mother, because he wished to direct the viewer’s eyes first to the abstract pattern of its tones and only secondly – if at all – to the picture’s subject. ‘To me, it is interesting as a picture of my mother,’ he conceded, ‘but what can or ought the public to care about the identity of the portrait?’ Viewers did care about the portrait, however, not only because everyone responds to the emotional effects of the human figure, but because it is far easier to recall such a picture by what it represents than by a titular abstraction – especially when there happens to be more than one Arrangement in Grey and Black by the same artist. This painting has become widely known, of course, as Whistler’s Mother. To me, the title is much more than a way to catalogue an image. If it were solely for that purpose, we could simply use numbers. It is part of how the artist passes on some of their thought processes. For that reason, I generally look at the title before I look at the image. Titling your work can be a very personal experience, so I will not suggest ways of coming up with titles. However, from my experience in assessing images, there are four areas that I strongly recommend you think about.
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