Valerie Chiang – All info is in the image (2017)

This is really effing fabulous, y’all.

It’s a solid image. There’s a sense of person and place, the pose is dynamic and it’s an image that would lose whatever It-thing renders it so damn visually compelling were it B&W instead of vibrantly full color.

Compositionally, the original image had some issues. Kacy is presented slightly left of center. From the standpoint of the way the eye scans this isn’t ideal. Were this digital, you could flip the image so that the top of the juke box/deli-display counter lines the eye up to scan to Kacy’s face and then her gaze back at the camera and through the camera the photographer/audience.

But this is an actual snapshot. So it is what it is.

Cutting a strip from the right and then appending it to the left is a solution that is elegant in its simplicity and stunningly effective. It moves Kacy to the center of the image, yet breaks up the composition in a way that makes the centering non-obtuse and perhaps even a bit enigmatic.

Then there’s the physical tactility of the way it’s presented. The composition book page and tape with a caption added; a caption that serves the same function as most titles for fine art photographs–it tells you what you’re already looking at.

(Let me digress momentarily here to say that after trolls, the most common asks I get are people pissed off when a title controverts their interpretation of an image. On one level I understand the frustration; on another–I think although it’s more challenging a title can actually contribute additional poetic resonance to an image. I always refer people pissed off about titles to Joel Sternfeld’s On This Site… which presents gorgeous large format landscapes and then with the title reveals a horrific crime that took place in that exact location years ago.)

What Chiang appears to be doing here is pointing to this tendency in a super meta fashion that sort of undercuts the logical underpinnings of this tendency.

I mean she’s basically presenting a photo and giving the photo a context–i.e. as something visceral but also as something diaristic (the notebook page, which should also be noted that by using the back side of the page instead of the front gels nicely with the compositional flaws in the photo as well as the fix.)

It’s all very elegant. But it’s interesting because the caption in the image: Kacy Hill, Cafe 50s, Los Angeles, CA merely describes what is been depicted. (That does provide some clarity at least for me because to my eye this could be a Brooklyn bodega deli for what I see of the background but the light is decidedly not east coast. The caption clarifies that.)

The title All the info is in the image is effectively illustrating what any fine art photographer does when the push work out of the nest into the world–where it will live or die on its own. The notion being that you convey enough of a context where the work can make a life independent of its creator. So it’s educational but I also feel like there’s a bit of an urge to proclaim that titling images is important and maybe we can do it in new and different ways just so long as we remember to enliven the context enough to justify such largess when it comes to authorial license.

Either way, I think Chiang’s work is several cuts above most of the stuff floating around the Interwebz these days. Definitely check her work out. It will reward your time and energy richly.