Image and Text

I was recently given The Best Of Life book, when I saw this picture by Bill Ray I immediately assumed it was about the Beatles, I was right.
Some images do not need explanation, in fact in photography and art things are left to be pondered over, the artist doesn't necessarily write a statement to go with the art work in a gallery. A photograph in a newspaper will be surrounded by text explaining further details, the picture just draws attention to the article. Most of us don't have time to read full articles so we rely on an image to give us as much information as possible.That is the role of the photographer, to convey a message, especially in documentary photography. As I have discovers recently, it is not always possible to convey a complex issue easily without some explanation. Maybe we need to give the person in a portrait some justification.
Subjects which have a delicate nature such as Paul Wenham Clarke's Hard Times/Big Issue work recently exhibited at St Martin's in Birmingham call for consideration.I went along to his talk at Margaret Street in October and was lucky enough to be able to talk to him about my interest in the subject of alcoholism. This is another subject that would need some use of text. My aim is to make portraits of various people who are either currently suffering from alcoholism, have overcome it (are sober) and people who can admit that drink does play too large a roll in their lives although they don't consider themselves alcoholics. i think it would be unkind to have people allow you to take their portrait and then leave their image open to the abuse of cynicism and lack of understanding of the subject.

 Paul Wenham Clarke

Paul Wenham Clarke

Paul Wenham Clarke

 Ella Carman

Ella Carman

This is not work I would put into my alcoholism project but they are images off alcoholics that I have taken. They are both people I know, in fact one of them is my partner.Micky the top picture suffers with ongoing alcoholism but has hugely moderated his drinking due to health scares and responsibilities. He has not engaged in AA preferring to dig deep and find his own determination.

This is an example of the sort of thing I might write but in a very draft form.

Paul Wenham Clarke's work explained how he came to meet the individuals, their situations and what happened to them as far as he was able to find out. He treated it with great compassion and it made the whole exhibition much more depth than it would have been without the information provided.