Photography education and criticism privilege verbal articulation. You’re expected to be able to explain your work, discuss your influences, articulate your intentions, write artist statements. Grants and residencies require written proposals. Publications want accompanying text. Teaching positions demand that you can explain your process clearly.
But many talented photographers can’t write coherently about their work, and it’s not because they haven’t thought deeply about it or because they’re inarticulate generally. It’s because the work happens in a non-verbal mode and translating it into words requires cognitive machinery they don’t have or have configured differently.
If you have a loud inner monologue, writing about photography feels like transcription. The internal dialogue is already happening, already forming sentences, already articulating ideas. You just make it external. The voice in your head that narrates your experience and processes your thoughts is generating material constantly. Writing is channelling that stream onto the page.
My inner monologue is loud and constant. It never stops. When I’m photographing, it’s analysing what I’m seeing, talking through decisions, evaluating results. When I’m editing, it’s discussing which images work and why. When I’m thinking about photography generally, it’s forming arguments, testing positions, debating, generating connections between ideas. All of this happens verbally, in sentences, as if I’m explaining things to someone even though I’m alone.
This newsletter exists because of that cognitive setup. I’m not labouring to translate non-verbal understanding into words. I’m transcribing a conversation that’s already happening. The writing flows relatively easily because the verbal machinery is running anyway. I’m just directing its output into publishable form.
For someone without that inner monologue, or with a much quieter one, writing is a completely different task. Their thinking doesn’t take verbal form naturally. They understand their work, often deeply, but that understanding exists as something other than words. Maybe as images, feelings, intuitions, bodily knowledge. When they’re required to write about it, they have to perform a translation from their native mode into verbal mode, and that translation is effortful, slow, and often feels inadequate.
The result is often frustration. They know what they mean. They can feel it. But getting it into words is like trying to describe music without being able to reference sound, or explain colour to someone who’s never seen. The verbal description always feels incomplete compared to the original understanding.
Photography particularly attracts people with strong visual processing and weaker verbal processing. They’re drawn to the medium because it lets them work in their native mode. They can think visually, respond to visual situations, communicate through images rather than words. For them, photography is liberation from the tyranny of verbal articulation that dominates most education and professional life.
Then they discover that even in photography, verbal articulation is demanded. They have to write statements, explain their process, teach using words, participate in criticism that happens verbally. They’re being judged partly on their ability to do the thing they chose photography to avoid. It’s deeply unfair.
A photographer who works primarily visually, who pre-visualises images and responds intuitively to visual situations without much internal verbal processing, can be brilliant at making photographs and genuinely inarticulate about them. Their intelligence and sophistication all lives in the visual domain. Forcing them to translate into the verbal domain doesn’t reveal their understanding. It just reveals that their cognitive architecture doesn’t include strong verbal processing.
Here I’m thinking about one of my niece that has verbal processing issues (e.g. she’s strongly dyslexic), and she should find a way through life that plays to her stronger visual operational mode. Asking her to explain her art, part of it being photography, is near impossible because that’s not how she processes things.
This creates a selection bias in who succeeds professionally. Photographers who can both make strong work and write convincingly about it have an enormous advantage over those who can only make the work. They get the grants, publications, teaching positions, critical attention. Not necessarily because their work is better but because they can play the verbal game that photography institutions require.
I benefit from this bias massively. My verbal processing gives me access to platforms and opportunities that might not be available if I could only show the work without explaining it. That advantage has nothing to do with my photography being better. It’s just cognitive luck that the skills photography institutions value happen to match the cognitive architecture I was born with.
The question is whether this is necessary or just historical accident. Does photography education and criticism need to be so heavily verbal, or is that just tradition from academic institutions that privilege verbal processing generally?
I think much of it is historical accident. Images can speak for themselves if we let them. A portfolio can demonstrate sophistication without an artist statement. Teaching can happen through showing and doing rather than explaining. Criticism can be visual, comparing and contrasting images rather than describing them verbally.
But the academic and institutional framework around photography is built on verbal articulation because that’s how academic and institutional frameworks operate generally. You write papers, give talks, participate in verbal discourse. Photography gets forced into that framework even though the medium itself doesn’t require it.
This doesn’t mean verbal articulation has no value. Writing about photography, when done well, can illuminate aspects of work that aren’t immediately visible. It can connect images to broader contexts, trace influences, articulate intentions that inform how work gets read. Verbal processing and visual processing can complement each other powerfully.
But they’re different skills requiring different cognitive equipment. Being brilliant at one doesn’t imply brilliance at the other, and requiring both creates barriers that have nothing to do with photographic ability.
Lots of photographers produce work far stronger than mine but they struggle terribly to write about it. They could show you what they meant. They could make images that demonstrated sophisticated visual thinking. But ask them to write three hundred words explaining their process and they’d labour for hours to produce something stilted and inadequate.
That inadequacy doesn’t reflect their understanding of their work. It reflects their cognitive architecture. Their thinking happens visually, and the translation into verbal form is difficult and lossy. What comes out in words is a pale approximation of what exists in their visual understanding.
The unfairness is compounded by how verbal articulation gets interpreted. If you can’t explain your work clearly, people assume you haven’t thought deeply about it. Verbal fluency gets confused with conceptual sophistication. Someone who can talk impressively about mediocre work gets taken more seriously than someone who makes brilliant work but can’t articulate it verbally.
I see this constantly in photography education, criticism, even online (think YT). People whose work is visually sophisticated but verbally unsophisticated get dismissed as “just intuitive” or “not conceptual.” Meanwhile, people who are verbally sophisticated but visually mediocre get treated as serious artists because they can write convincing statements.
The bias is so deep that many photographers internalise it. If they can’t write well about their work, they assume that’s a failing they need to correct. They labour to become more verbally articulate instead of recognising that their native mode of understanding is visual and that’s legitimate.
Some develop serviceable verbal skills through sheer effort. They learn to translate their visual thinking into words well enough to satisfy institutional requirements. But it never feels natural, and it often takes time away from making work because verbal processing doesn’t come easily to them.
Others avoid situations that require verbal articulation. They don’t apply for grants, don’t teach, don’t engage with critical discourse. They just make work and show it, staying in the visual domain where they’re comfortable. This limits their professional opportunities but lets them work in their native mode.
Neither strategy is ideal. The first forces people to develop skills that don’t serve their actual practice. The second excludes them from opportunities and platforms that could benefit their work.
The better solution is recognising that verbal articulation is one skill among many, not a requirement for photographic legitimacy. A photographer who can’t write convincingly about their work isn’t less serious or less thoughtful. They’re just working in a non-verbal mode, and their intelligence lives in the images rather than in explanations of the images.
Institutions could adapt by valuing visual literacy as much as verbal literacy. Assess photographers on their images, their editing, their visual sophistication, not primarily on their ability to write statements. Create alternatives to written proposals and essays that let visual thinkers demonstrate their understanding visually.
Some of this is happening gradually. Portfolio reviews that focus on showing work rather than explaining it. Teaching methods that emphasise demonstration over verbal instruction. Critical discourse that happens through comparing images rather than describing them verbally.
But the institutional pressure toward verbal articulation remains strong because academic culture generally privileges verbal processing. Until that changes, photographers without strong inner monologues will continue struggling with a requirement that has little to do with their actual abilities.
In a way it’s ironic that as a species humans are so visually orientated, but they rely on verbal communication to exchange that information.
The work is what matters. If it requires a thousand words of explanation to function, the work probably isn’t strong enough. But if the work stands on its own and the photographer can’t articulate it verbally, that’s fine. Their understanding lives in the images, and that’s where photography happens anyway.
This newsletter exists because my loud inner voice gives me material to transcribe. But that’s cognitive luck, not evidence that verbal processing is necessary for sophisticated photography. Some of the strongest visual thinkers in photography can barely write a paragraph. Their intelligence is no less real for being non-verbal.
#Photography #IMayBeWrong #opinion #Personal #CognitiveProcessing