Do you give your artwork a title?

Do you give your artwork a title? I haven’t been but I believe I may have to start titling my work, and possibly a bit of a description/artist statement about the work or project.

I always thought it was interesting to go to an art museum and see a piece of artwork that was titled, “Untitled”. I never gave it much thought that I was doing the same exact thing. Not titling my work. Even when I would export an image from Photoshop or Lightroom the “title” (read file name) was often something like DSC_####. Every once in a while I would be creative and name a file something like “name of location # of #”.

Maybe everything doesn’t need a title, such as doing a portrait session or family photographs but shouldn’t we give them a bit of a description? I have found old slides and negatives I took years ago that vaguely remember taking but I have no idea of who some of the people in the photograph are. In fact, a couple of years ago I discovered I photographed a wedding back in the early 1980s for some friends, at the time. I vaguely remember the people but I cannot remember their names or the exact date and location where the photographs were taken. I’ve done the same thing with recent digital images. I’ve improved with giving keywords when importing into my Lightroom catalog. My filing system is still a work in progress.

One of the reasons I have thought about this topic is that I am working on setting up an online store to sell art prints. When placing images in the store, you must give the artwork a title and a description. Shouldn’t the same thing apply to our photographs even if they are set in our digital catalogs? It would make it easier to find assets for projects and refresh our memories when we review past work and help us gather ideas for future projects. Then, worst-case scenario, if something were to happen to us or others were to search our digital catalogs they would know something about the subject, location, why, and other particulars we thought were important enough for us to take a particular photograph.