Stop Explaining Your Photographs - Moments of Mood, 3.9
The MOOD Podcast - Matt Jacob
In this episode of The MOOD Podcast, Matt Jacob explores the powerful impact of refraining from explaining photographs. He argues that over-
Key takeaways
- Viewers' misinterpretations often reveal your true artistic voice more accurately than your intended meaning.
- The act of explaining photographs is less about helping others understand and more about protecting yourself from uncertainty.
Main topics
- The role of explanation in photography
- The value of viewer misinterpretation
Notable quotes
When someone reads your image wrong, what's actually happening here? They're not hallucinating... they're reading the thing you made without any of the baggage.
Conclusion
The most valuable feedback on your work often comes not from your explanations but from the silence after you
Transcript preview
Speaker 1 (0:00) Do you think you should explain your photographs to people or should you just let them sit there in silence and let the images speak for themselves? And I know this kind of sounds trivial, a bit of a small thing, almost probably like a question of manners, but I've actually come to think it's actually one of the more important questions you can ask yourself as a photographer because buried inside it is this whole problem. of how you ever really find out what your work is saying. So that's what I want to get into today in this episode of Moments of Mood. Why the little explanation we all give before someone looks at our image or images and what we all do to it might be costing us the most useful information we can get about our own voice. And I'll give you something to take away in this episode, a way to test all of this on your own work. I'll say now I do have an opinion on this one, of course. I think you should stop explaining your photographs. And hopefully by the end of this episode, you'll at least understand why I've landed in that conclusion. Speaker 1 (1:15) This is the Mood Podcast. I am Matt Jacob, and this is the show that helps emerging photographers find their voice so you can build a cohesive body of work, articulate what it's about, and get it in front of the right people. It's really the only photography podcast that is itself a practice, and every week I sit down with you or with a guest and break a single idea in a commentary like this one called Moments of Mood or Discuss. the wider goings on of photography and process within it. So I am sure you've experienced this. You show an image or a selection of images to friends or family or maybe somewhere a bit more formal, maybe a critique or a workshop, even social media, maybe whatever it is. And what comes back is not necessarily what you've made or not what you thought you made. Someone sees melancholy in a photograph you took on one of the happiest days you can remember, for example. Or someone asks if a project is about loss when, in your head, it was always about maybe resilience. And there's that little moment, right, where you feel the correction rising up in you. No, no, no. Let me tell you what it's actually about. Let me give you the context. And outcomes, the backstory, where you were, what you intended, what they're supposed to be feeling and looking at. We basically repair their reading of it, right? I've done this more times than I could count. And honestly, I still catch myself doing it today. And for years, I thought that was just, well, part of it, part of sharing your work. You know, you share the picture and you explain the picture. A lot of emerging photographers really want text with images or titles to either explain or elevate them somehow. And I see this all the time. It even feels generous, doesn't it? Like you're helping people appreciate it properly. And there's definitely some deep-rooted condescension in there, right? But somewhere along the way, for me anyway, I started to suspect that the explaining wasn't really for them. It was more for me. Because if I'm being honest, Any little speech before