The devil and the captions

The subscriber Teresa Maria Castanyer rightly pointed out that we made a mistake in a photo caption according to which the Holy Father was at mass, when in reality he was at the window of the apostolic palace from where he recites the Sunday angelus. But it turns out that, upon seeing the chronicle where I echoed it on the digital version, which is uploaded on the afternoon before the paper, there was a new error in the photo caption, again with Leo XIV as the victim of the secular sacrifice of journalism. The deputy director on duty, David Miró, fixed it and saved me the embarrassment of seeing that the practice I had identified as incorrect was reproduced in the pantheon of my page of June 14th.Miró, who carries a lot of journalistic experience in his professional backpack, told me the phrase that inspires my headline: “Photo captions are loaded by the devil”. If another pope, Paul VI, already warned that Satan's smoke had entered the Church, let's imagine the press, and what's more, in this case it enters to play tricks on its highest dignitary. But the curse continues and the same reader Castanyer alerts me again about a blunder in a photo caption: “Today, Thursday the 18th [of June], a photo caption in the paper edition, page 12, shows little rigor in whoever has to marry text and image. That it is not a press conference is obvious. And that it is not Évian can be suspected. And that it is Versailles can be deduced if it is known that yesterday the two presidents [Macron and Trump] were having dinner in Versailles. In short... aliquando dormitat Homerus". The quote from Horace means “from time to time, Homer sleeps”, that is, sometimes wisdom falters. I have received more criticism about the photo captions. Paola Jubert writes: “I am reading today's newspaper, Sunday [June 21 and following days], and on page 21 there is an article about an award received by Eurecat. I imagine the article is subsidized, but the signature says 'Editorial Staff'. The surprise, or indignation, is about the photo caption where the three men are identified by name and their position, and the female figure is belittled, as if she were a figurant. Who is she? What is she doing at the award ceremony? Does she not deserve to be mentioned?”. The subscriber Andreu Suriol, in an email ironically titled “Vision of the future”, points out that in a photo caption from July 5, the second day of the Tour, it read: “Tadej Pogacar (UAE Team Emirates) in action with other cyclists during the 14th stage of the Tour 2026”. Suriol, citing AI, specifies that it was the 2025 stage that took place on the mountain in the photo. And it turns out that in the cover photo of that day, the Tour was where it really was: at the foot of the Sagrada Familia.To validate readers' perception of photo caption errors, the Defender also addresses the omission ex officio: on the digital front page, it is very common to have photos without captions, and when they are of unknown people, the reader has to enter the article to relate a face with a message so important that it is highlighted in the newspaper's letter of credence.I have forwarded the complaints to the head of Photography at the newspaper, Ferran Forné, who gives me his opinion:“The photography section does not affect the editing of captions in the print version, the permissions we have in the print newspaper's editing and layout program are limited only to graphic content. It is true that normally, when reviewing the content, if we detect an error, we inform the editor or the person in charge of closing the print edition or a proofreader."Regarding the absence of photo captions on the web homepage, it is an aesthetic decision made by the web designers to maintain a cleaner image and to maximize the digital space available for layout, especially on mobile device formats. Errors in photo captions affect us in the strictest journalistic sense, just like the rest of the professionals at ARA who strive to offer a rigorous product. But above all, we are very attentive to the correct assignment of the image, in order to maintain the authorship of the photographers or the agency and to be able to verify the source of information that we show the reader.”Finally, I have completed the view of the subject with the assessment of Teresa Ferré i Panisello, doctor in communication sciences and postgraduate in contemporary history. She is a professor at the UAB, has an abundant research curriculum on photojournalism, and has been curator of several exhibitions. She says:“The photograph-text binomial in journalism must be understood as an inseparable unit, since no informative medium can fulfill its objective solely through the image, due to its polysemic nature. The caption, if perfectly crafted, can answer five of the six questions of a news story (what, where, when, who, and why), but it does not communicate the how. Only when we have a photojournalistic piece in front of us, with a longer caption, is there room for the interpretation of facts and allows for a non-informative headline. And, obviously, any caption should never describe what is obvious and perceived by looking at the photograph."The reflection on the importance of the caption dates back a long time. Walter Benjamin, in the 1930s, said it would be the most important element of journalistic photography to prevent the reader from focusing solely on the aesthetic value and realizing the political and social value. Forty years later, Gisèle Freund analyzed how the meaning of a photograph can radically change depending on the caption that one newspaper or another decides to put on it, which shows that it is the main tool for ideological contextualization in the press".The Defender's conclusion, to avoid being seen as an exorcist, is to bend the devil civilly. The relationship between a writer and a photographer who do a chronicle, an interview, or a report together is obvious and can become intense depending on the topics or characters. This in situ interaction should be prolonged in the editing, to maintain the "inseparable unit" pointed out by Dr. Ferré. When the photos are from an agency, the Head of Photography is the one who could oversee this relationship, taking on the functions of the picture editor that the Americans invented, imported by César Lucas and Marisa Flórez at the dawn of El País and brought up to date by Carlos Pérez de Rozas and Pepe Baeza when La Vanguardia changed its design with Milton Glaser.Regarding the absence of photo captions on digital front pages, I believe – I have communicated this to the newspaper's management – that aesthetics or functionality should not prevail over information. The academy, which sets the pace for applied science, prescribes that in its indexed publications or papers each image must be accompanied by the source and an explanatory text. As a corollary, I advocate for paying attention to photo captions and not dismissing them routinely, given that they are the most read element after headlines, according to research from the Poynter Institute for Media Studies, a true benchmark of journalism. I thank Teresa Maria Castanyer, Paola Jubert, and Andreu Suriol for making us reflect on a text as unjustly undervalued as photo captions, but with a powerful semantics inversely proportional to its scarce syntax.The Reader's Advocate takes note of doubts, suggestions, criticisms, and complaints about the newspaper's content in its digital and paper editions, and ensures that the treatment of information is in accordance with the deontological codes.To contact the Reader's Ombudsman you can send an email to eldefensor@ara.cat or record a message of no more than one minute to the WhatsApp number 653784787. In all cases, identification with name, surnames, and DNI number is required.