Writing photo captions for the Web by Ruth Garner, Mark Gillingham, and Yong Zhao
Photographs are rarely self-sufficient. They need captions. A caption tells us something about the person or thing photographed, also something about the photographer. In this article, we discuss how to write photo captions for the Web. We provide examples from adults’ and children’s work.

Photo captions — the good ones, at least — are informative. Without the caption for the Queen Victoria photograph, we might recognize the woman pictured as someone rich and famous (she sits so regally on horseback, after all), but we might not know which rich and famous person she is.

Does that matter? It doesn’t, if we are skimming through the Barthes (1981) book simply to take note of the great variety of photographers’ subject matter. If, however, we find this particular photograph of historical interest, if we are studying it, we surely will want to know more — who the woman is, when the photograph was taken, and so on. For someone studying a photograph, an image is seldom self-sufficient. A caption is required.

A photograph requiring a caption need not be a portrait of a queen, and it need not be a photograph reproduced in a book. It might be an online photograph of a robot.…

http://firstmonday.org/issues/issue8_9/garner/