I do. But not for all. Only those that I have an experience that I wanna share and I think are relevant to other’s experiences.

I think you could like Daniel Milnor (on YouTube and his website is called shifter.media).

It’s okay to supplement a photo with a story but the moment you need to tell a story to explain what you are seeing or are supposed to feel then the photo isn’t any good.

But sadly enough a lot of people buy photos based on the story that goes with it and not because of the photo, so it’s become a case of who can bullshit the most will sell the most.

I totally understand what you are saying. When I photograph, I do it very intuitively. It’s often, not always, only after looking at the images at home, that I can explain what drew me in.

When posting on Instagram, I mostly just write the year and place, but sometimes a caption just springs to mind when I’m looking at the photo. A little story of how I took the picture, why, or what I like so much about it. Sometimes just a general thought about photography itself.

I enjoy reading this from other photographers as well. It provides a little bit of context for the work, which is not always necessary, but sometimes does make you look twice at a photo and puts it in perspective.

In general, putting emotions, feelings into words, in writing, helps me understand and deal with them.

I once took one of those elaborate personality tests at a job center and my profile was “artistic-intellectual”. I also studied languages. This might explain my inclinations…

I like to write small quotes for my photos

I rarely do. I once wrote short little thing for a Flickr group competition and people there ended up liking it: https://www.flickr.com/groups/82512520@N00/discuss/72157716452607876/72157716790233112

I also sometimes write long captions if I do another version of a photo that got comments&questions: https://www.flickr.com/photos/138284229@N02/34647895731

I enjoy taking photos as a hobby, but pay the bills by writing and editing professionally. When I worked at a newspaper, I would always talk with the photo editors after deadline for advice on taking pictures and about how they learned photography. Writing about cameras and photography for myself (in a blog nobody reads) has helped me take better pictures, because it pushes me to think more deliberately about what I’m doing. I can see how writing could help anyone, especially if they ever want to write a book about taking better pictures or get into photojournalism or write a book that presents their artwork. For writing in general, I highly recommend the books “Simple & Direct” (Barzun) and “On Writing Well” (Zinsser). In both professions, photography and writing, self editing is one of the most difficult, yet most important, skills to learn.

I write about my work on Substack! There’s an excellent community of photographers there writing about their work. You can find me @beyondthegrain