Writing Abolut Your Work

Are Photographers more objective and painters more subjective, and if so does this require photographers to speak of their work more so than painters?

I guess there is a bigger questions that should be answered in order to get to this one.

Is there the need to write about art (specifically, one's own work)?

Right now I am reading Robert Adams' Why People Photograph, and I must say I really enjoy the "easy reading" aspect of Adams words. Because I have been so unmotivated as of late, I needed a more straightforward read, as opposed to forcing myself back into all those crazy French guys. That being said, Why People Photograph is wonderful in its motivation. I know what he is saying with the first read through...I recommend it. Anyway...rambling.

Robert Adams states, "The minute they do so (artists writing about their work) they've admitted failure. Words are proof that the vision they had is not, in the opinion of some at least, fully there in the picture." He backs up his thinking with statements from multiple artists in multiple mediums. Charles Demuth, "I have been urged...to write about my painting...why? Haven't I, in a way, painted them?" Robert Frost, in a response to why he doesn't write about his poems' meanings, "You want me to say it worse?" And, C.S. Lewis said that he had never been less sure of his beliefs then when he tried to verbalize them.

Does this mean that photographers should not be writers of their own work? Maybe they should try to write about others' works , especially when that work is admired or seen as influential to the photographer. This approach, Adams believes, is as close as photographers want to come to writing about their own intentions. Adams does point out that if this approach is taken up by a photographer, more than likely, the influenced photographer's work can be directly traced to the previous photographer whose work he/she wrote about. (Easy analogy; me writing about Ray Metzker's work...there are obvious things I like in his pictures, and am more than likely trying to reproduce in my own). A reader can understand what a photographer enjoys in terms of an aesthetic or subject matter regarding another artist, then can see if the photographer's own work conveys a similar sentiment.

In the end it must be agreed upon, considering the difficulty of writing (about one's own work at least), that as John Szarkowski has said, "The better the writing is the more necessary it makes the picture."