Painting with words: describing women in photography

Abstract

This study aims to identify and explore the linguistic devices used to describe women in photography, and the similarities and differences between women and men’s descriptions. Nowadays, digital photographs are often accompanied by text such as titles, descriptions, comments, or tags. Though the language used in social media has largely been explored in relation to different fields of knowledge and from different perspectives, to the best of our knowledge, there is no work dealing with the language used by professional photographers to describe women and men. In order to carry out the study, we have compiled two samples of the keywords used to describe images representing female and male figures; the source of such sample being an image stock used by professional photographers (Alamy). To fulfil our objective, descriptive adjectives were identified, analyzed, and compared and/or contrasted. The results show many similarities in the use of the descriptive adjectives for women and men’s images, and they also seem to suggest that women and women’s beauty in particular are described from the male perspective and their stereotypes in our society.