POV: Caption Brouhaha

A brouhaha erupted in a professional photographers' forum over the captioning of a photograph by the owner/publisher of a well-known (and well-respected for its technical content) photography website. The issue at hand is a photograph of a girl, in her very early teens, standing at a doorway in a pose that the photographer described as " sexually provocative" and hence captioned it as "Lolita". Let me add here that the photograph was made somewhere in the Amazon.

One of the photojournalists member of the forum was sufficiently offended by that caption that he emailed his point of view to the photographer, and asking the reason for naming the child as Lolita. The response (perhaps understandably) came back as defensive, dismissive and tactless: " Given the fact that she looks to be about 13 years old and is pregnant, can you think of a better name?".

This led to a brouhaha with all kinds of commentary, both intemperate and more balanced, and eventually to the photographer publishing a statement on his website, which essentially is summarized in the following quote: "In this case I titled a photograph of a clearly sexually provocative young woman with a word in the popular vernacular that, I believe, adds to its overall effect. It is not an editorial statement. it is the title of an art work."

I will neither post the photograph nor give details of either the forum or the photography website for obvious reasons, but in this particular dogfight I believe that the photographer was wrong in captioning the photograph of this child with such a provocative name...which, at least in our Western society's vernacular, is indeed suggestive. He has made certain assumptions about the child that may not be true...and could've easily have found her real name. Naturally, if the photograph of the girl was taken in the United States or Europe, the photographer wouldn't have dared to publish it without a model's release, or at least without her real name. I think he was also wrong in his knee-jerk tactless reply.

I have seen the photograph and to describe it (as he does, above) as an art work denotes an over inflated ego. It barely qualifies as a snapshot...nice try though, but let's move on.

I think the positive out of this spat is that it provokes us to think how we caption our own photographs, and how we present them to the public. Although I describe myself as a travel photographer, I believe that I have responsibilities identical to those of photojournalists, and I work hard at avoiding to editorialize my captions. Depending on circumstances, I obtain the names of everyone I photograph to caption their images accurately. If I don't have the name, I just don't make up one...to me, giving a name such as Lolita to a young girl by a photographer (unless she agrees to it, and it qualifies as "art") to be tactless and unprofessional. This photograph does not qualify as art by any stretch of the imagination.