BEN CURTIS: Someone was arguing the merits of being vague — providing more avenues of inference and this sort of thing. And I read that and I agreed, or at least I understood what he was saying, and that there were merits in his argument. From my perspective, professionally, that’s an interesting argument and one that probably has validity in terms of how photos are used and more from an artistic viewpoint. That question is a valid one — on how you’re going to put pictures in a gallery or maybe how you’re going to use photos in a book. That doesn’t affect how I work or how I want to work. I want to get the pictures and I want to get full, accurate information. And if I had the time, I’d write 200 words about a picture. There’s a reasonable limit to how long captions can be. But I try and put as much information in the caption as I possibly can. Now, what a newspaper does with that or what a gallery might do with that or what a website might do with that, that’s their decision. Sometimes I might see one of my photographs with no information and think, “That’s a shame they didn’t put it in.” Sometimes they might rewrite the caption. Quite often this happens. Someone will use a wire agency picture and write their own caption under the picture, and then you’ll get criticized by some reader somewhere for the caption that was put under the image on a particular website. They think that you wrote that. All I can say is, I take the pictures, I write the captions, I put as much information as possible, I send it to my desk in London, they put it out to the world, and everything that happens after is completely outside my control. A lot of newspapers won’t put bylines, they won’t put credit to either the agency or myself. Other newspapers will put a full byline. Others will put a full credit. Others will print a very full caption. Others won’t put a caption in at all. Everything that happens after my pictures hit the wire; it’s not within my control.
ERROL MORRIS: The Joe Rosenthal picture of the flag raising at Iwo Jima is an example of how a picture is often captioned by someone other than the photographer. Rosenthal did not even see his iconic photograph before it was developed and sent off to various newspapers and magazines. Nor did he write the caption.
[Later, when asked whether his photograph was posed, Rosenthal said that it was. But he was referring to a different photograph — his photograph of the soldiers posing for his camera just after the flag was raised. Indeed, there is even a photograph of Rosenthal taking the posed photograph of the soldiers. Private Robert R. Campbell , a Marine photographer, was standing behind Rosenthal and captured the scene. Joe Rosenthal himself was seemingly unaware his picture was being taken by Campbell. And the soldiers were posing for Rosenthal’s camera — not for Campbell. So, is Campbell’s photograph candid or posed?]