For most of my working life I've been a writer first and foremost, because that's what has put food on the family table. And maybe that's why, when I'm making work, I sometimes come up with titles in the same moment as I make the image.
Come to think of it, it's something that I've always done. As a young bloke, back when I still thought that making documentary photography might be a viable career option, I called an imaginary collection of pictures 'Towards a New Photography.' My intention was, of course, satirical, partly because I've always found artists' explanations of their work at best confusing and at worst... well, enough said.
As an aside I'm also a guitarist - but only in the sense that I own a guitar - and my only composition, which has already had a thousand iterations each more appalling than the last, is called While My Audience Gently Weeps. That title could equally well apply to most of my other work, to be fair.
Anyhow, the image above is from my Grainger Market series, and shows some of the contents of a small display case in a gloomy corner near one of the entrances. Now, like all 'intellectuals' I can't look at a picture of a pipe without thinking of Magritte, specifically the painting 'Ceci n'est pas une pipe', and signs and signifiers in general. (I also can't help thinking of Magritte's slyly smutty double-entendre in the title, but that's another story.)
My pipe pictures are also part of another series, and are really motivated by my interest in 'the unseen hand', which empties and sometimes refills the display between my visits. (It seems, incidentally, that there are a surprising number of pipe smokers in Newcastle, though I've yet to actually see one. Perhaps they're all Surrealists too.)
Either way, to draw some kind of ludicrous false equivalence between my work and Magritte's would be as unhelpful as it would be pompous. A red herring if you like - now there's an idea for an image.
And so I avoid giving titles, beyond factual details, to almost all of my pictures, no matter how tempted I am to break the rule.
There's another couple of reasons that I avoid titles. Fundamentally I make pictures to escape the tyranny of language, it's overt meanings and its linearity, so that's one reason. But there's also the fact that I believe that all art is collaborative, so I don't want to lead any viewer towards any particular interpretation of any picture or series of pictures. Sure, I've made lot of these pictures during a period in which my own mortality has become more than a matter of purely academic interest to me, but there are actually all kinds of other themes, ideas and preoccupations represented here.
Frankly, you can tell me why I like wrapped objects, hazy windows, ivy-clad trees crumbling masonry and all the rest so much. All I know is that there are rather a lot of visual triggers out there in the world that compel me to raise my camera.
So let's meet half way: I'll try to produce a few half-decent smudges, and you can come up with your own titles. Smutty puns are always welcome.
