A-1, Colloferro, Italy 2012 copyright Douglas Stockdale
It seems to me that I have an easier time determining what I want the resulting photograph to look like than determine the title (caption). Such is the chaos of the creative process.
For my roadside memorial and remembrance photographic titles I think that I have been all over the map, literally, with different ideas and possible options. I really would like a unique title for each photograph that will allow one image not to be confused with another. Not so easy in the case when there may be a series of un-named aftermath memorials along the same stretch of highway. Initially when this project was published in LensWork magazine I had provided titles that were a bit descriptive, such as “Five Crosses” or “Heart Broken Fence”.
So over time I have been trying to wrestle this title issue to the mat for this project, which has appearances of being a documentary project while I want to try to avoid the potential sensationalism of the subject matter. So I am now deferring for the titles to the name of the adjacent roadway that the memorial is found in conjunction with the proximity of a city and the state (for the international memorials, also include the country). Such as the photograph above, which was found on the A-1 southbound from Rome and situated near the city of Colloferro.
For multiple memorials that I have found on the same roadway, it creates some overlap due to the close proximity, I will include a name of person who is associated with the memorial in parens following the location title. I am still not sure what I am going to do when I have a tighter composition of a memorial (similar to a “portrait”) and a broader and more inclusive landscape of the same memorial, as I now thinking of paring the images of these two viewpoints across the gutter from each other.
For image titles, I think I am getting closer!
Cheers
Doug
Singular Images 
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