titling – Ming Thein | Photographer

[Image removed – Société des Auteurs dans les arts graphiques et plastiques does not permit Magritte’s work to be used for editorial or educational purposes, but you can still google it].
The Empire of Light

The repost of the titling article a couple of days back was a deliberate choice to set you up for today’s somewhat more abstract and surrealist discussion. I was recently re-looking at the way Rene Magritte handled day-night transitions or zones in the same painting to see if there were any ideas there which could be translated to photography in a beyond-literal way, specifically inspired by the above painting. It’s one of my favourites for several reasons. There are physical elements which I personally find appealing, such as the fluffy clouds and the heavy, tonally-rich shadow areas; it’s non-literal in that the image shown is actually impossible to see in reality given the physical constraints of the world; and finally, the use of colour to split the mood of the painting so decisively in two (relaxing, safe, pleasant above, slightly sinister and potentially dangerous below) – yet maintain a complimentary color palette and aesthetic that still tricks the audience into believing it’s physically plausible. I think the implied continuation of the scene outside the edges of the painting (especially at the right – no neat cut points here!) contributes very strongly to this. Actually, all of the above is true and not true: there are several paintings in the series, which Magritte gave the same titles: The Empire of Light. All of them have the same elements, however: fluffy white clouds against a blue sky; a dark, slightly foreboding urban element with a high ambiguity factor at the bottom of the frame, and a single street light. After viewing this and many others of Magritte’s paintings, the real question I’m left asking is usually around the titles: how do they clearly manage to relate to what’s visually present whilst simultaneously neither being literal but giving you the feeling that there’s something philosophically deeper going on? And moreover, how does one learn to title like that?

The more I look at Magritte’s work (who was also a somewhat less art notorious photographer in his day), the more I believe the titles and the image are inseparable; however, some historical research suggests that he worked in two ways with paintings: either starting from a philosophical idea – which often later got condensed into the title – or he worked completely in reverse, with elements of themes that dominated at certain portions of his life* and then played a sort of parlour game with friends in the same surrealist philosophical circle to try to give the work a name. I personally think is much easier to understand The Treachery of Images than The Empire of Light; in some ways, even though the former is not anywhere as literal, it’s conceptually more straightforward because it was intended to represent the distillation of an idea into a simple visual form, which goes along the lines of:

Every painting or picture, no matter how realistic or good or easily recognisable, is not the original object.
The image presented is a stand in for the original object and merely represents or conjures by association the qualities and physical properties and of that object – an effigy, in effect.
The initial visual impression of the above image is a very literal one, because the image is unambiguous: we see a representation of a pipe, and our brains make the associative leap to assume that it represents the pipe and its physical qualities.
The text then serves to break this association by forcing us to read, notice and comprehend it because it is unusual and out of place (breaking pattern, thus drawing attention to it) in the painting: “This is not a pipe”.
The title of the image could be something literal, like “The pipe”, or something conceptual, like “Illusions”; in this case, the idea behind the image came first, and was refined down to “The Treachery of Images”: in that we can make potentially dangerous mistakes assuming something is, as opposed to something represents.

*Clouds, birds, spherical bells, chess pieces, men in suits, pipes, trees, picture frames, food items etc. – it actually seemed like he was mostly staying within a fairly universally recognisable vocabulary for the time period; this is interesting because use of anything obscure would have greatly increased difficulty of interpretation of the paintings, which were already not exactly literal or straightforward to begin with. We don’t have quite as big a problem with this in photography because we can only represent real objects, which greatly increases recognisability and reduces the potential for misinterpretation/ confusion.

In many ways, The Treachery of Images is a very solid distillation of the conceptual side of Magritte’s images: they aren’t literal, and the elements used represent something – sometimes ideas in themselves, or historical/personal associations, or something else. But whatever the case is, an apple is never just an apple. The titles exist to both help us through the interpretation (avoiding ‘the treachery’) by giving us a window into Magritte’s thought process, but also to force us to stop, really think about subconscious, almost reflex assumptions about the world – and subsequently look harder.

Perhaps the most famous of Magritte’s paintings, The Son of Man has a title that feels like it almost carries all of the information necessary to decipher the idea, but not quite; you can feel it tugging at the edges of your brain, but the viewer is still forced to make that final logical leap themselves. My interpretation is a biblical one: the apple represents knowledge and original sin; Eve is no longer in the picture, but her descendant is once again clothed and hiding their shame – the face can represent individualism, identity; a visible face, honesty and openness. (The garb is also typical of what Magritte wore; is he referring to himself?) A hidden face becomes shame or ambiguity or simple untrustworthiness; the obscuring apple is presumably hiding behind knowledge. What throws us out a little here are the visual qualities of the picture: it’s far too ‘clean’ and ‘happy’ with traditionally flattering and ‘good’ light to imply the sort of malice we’d expect from a businessman hiding his face (and implied activities). That lends a sense of hope, I think, which is confirmed by the title: ‘son’ implies this a subsequent (and possibly better) generation.

There is of course no way to know if was thinking all that when he was painting it, or simply set out to make a self-portrait without his face, and saw some apples on the counter – and then presented the painting to his surrealist philosophical circle and they named it after what they saw; it could be that the strong resonance of title with image was the result of the audience, not the creator**.

**Interesting idea: allowing your audience to title an image based on what they see, which may be very different from what you saw or intended at the time of capture.

In a lot of cases, the process must have been quite a lot more iterative than that – the result of a discussion, rather than a straw poll or a single person thinking. I suppose we can think of this as the evolution of a title: the above image is a good example. If I had to guess, it was more like a stream of consciousness and series of associations, which probably went something like this (individual lines representing steps in logical progression):

Sun dominates sunset / egg / country estate
Evening / power / food / formal – stuffy – official
Official event in the evening at formal location…
voila: The Banquet!

Having already created singles and series around an idea or theme – I’m going to have to try this second method for a future set of images, with the ultimate goal of combining the two…MT

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I’ve always believed a strong image should be able to stand on its own without a title – after all, sometimes images and titles get separated (quite often, actually) – and if it isn’t self-explanatory to some degree without it, then the image itself isn’t clear. However, a good title certainly enhances impact of an image; it can explain, direct, add another layer of meaning, put into context, force the thoughts of the audience in a certain direction, create contrast or tension between perceptual reality and actual reality (visual content vs asserted content or vice versa) or merely serve as an easy method of reference to an image. I’ve frequently been asked how I pick a title for my images; today’s essay explores that in a bit more detail. There really isn’t a lot of science in it, though a large vocabulary probably helps, as does a ready store of cultural references. Firstly, I don’t think choosing – or perhaps more appropriately, creating a title can be entirely spontaneous and retrospective. In fact, it really all boils down to the fourth important thing.

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