Image Citations and Captions

Citing each illustration or figure properly, and in sufficient detail, is a critical component of scholarly research and knowledge production. Your practice of attribution and citation can play an important role in the fair use of copyrighted materials. In an art history context, your citational practice has ethical implications for how works of art, architecture, and archival materials and their creators are described, which influences how current and future scholarship will search and retrieve those images and bring them into new scholarly arguments. 

While some elements of drafting and editing captions, citations, and figure lists may seem tedious, formulaic, or frustrating, we want to emphasize that image citation work is an opportunity to actively participate in the process of knowledge production. While there are guidelines for what information to include, as an author, you have the power to change what information is emphasized and included in your citations. While citing articles and scholarly publications is somewhat different from citing and/or captioning artworks themselves, a critical approach to citation practices may benefit your project. We encourage you to discuss with your advisor and/or committee, but the VRC’s position is that you do not need to cut and paste exactly as an artwork, object, or site has been cited before, especially if 1) it includes harmful or inaccurate information and 2) your research and argument warrants an edit or other intervention into how the work is cited and described. 

The VRC and Nancy Spiegel, Bibliographer for Art, Cinema, and History recommend starting with the following style guides. We also recommend exploring the VRC’s list of Critical Cataloging Resources and Ethical Considerations for Images. [Last updated 4/14/23; first published 6/3/22|

 

Style Guides

Chicago Manual of Style

The Chicago Manual of Style (CMOS) contains several sections relevant to citing and captioning images. Chapter 3: Illustrations and Tables discusses strategies for formatting captions and provides several examples. 

College Art Association

The College Art Association (CAA) publishes several journals and maintains an excellent Publication Style Guide which provides instructions on formatting captions as well as excellent examples for a variety of work types. The CAA Guide provides practical advice on specific topics, including: 

  • What to do when an artwork’s or text’s title is best known in its original language
  • When to include information about if an image was scanned from a book


CAA notes that for anything not detailed in their guide, authors and editors should default to CMOS.

Creative Commons

Wikimedia Commons is one of the largest repositories of images made available for reuse via Creative Commons licenses, but many museums and cultural heritage organizations are also beginning to use Creative Commons licenses for their images. Citing images made available via Creative Commons licenses requires special attention beyond what traditional style guides suggest for citing images and figures. First, prepare the citation or caption of the image or work of art according to the style guide of your choice. The quality of metadata on Creative Commons images can vary greatly, especially those on Wikimedia Commons, so how users describe the images they’re making available via these licenses may differ from how you need to cite the image in your context. Next, please add a statement to the end of that citation or caption that indicates:

  • the title of the licensed image, if a user supplied a title to Wikimedia Commons (this element may not be necessary when using a Creative Commons licensed image provided by a museum’s website) 
  • the username of whomever made the image available
  • and the specific Creative Commons license applied to the image, including hyperlinks 

Here are examples of captions formatted using the CAA Publications Style Guide, with statements regarding the Creative Commons license added to the end: 

Gerhard Geyer, Matthias Grünewald, 1957, bronze. Konzerthalle Ulrichskirche. This image (Gerhard Geyer) is made available by Seatoj under the Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 3.0 Unported license.

Unrecorded North Coast Chongoyape (?) artist, Plaque, 1000-200 BC, hammered and cut gold, 12.5 x 13.8 cm. Cleveland Museum of Art, 1938.431. This image is made available by the Cleveland Museum of Art under the Creative Commons (CC0 1.0) Public Domain Dedication license.

Citation Management

The Library maintains an excellent guide on Citation Management, including citation management tools which are programs that collect records and citations from research databases that you can organize into your research projects and writing. Many of these tools have “write-and-cite” features which allow you to create footnotes, citations, and bibliographies automatically.

Citational Ethics and Citational Justice

Citational ethics and citational justice address the fact that citational practices in the academy are lopsided, favoring white men. Authority is constructed and perpetuated through citations, so we encourage you to reflect on who you are citing and what scholars or perspectives may be left out as a way to determine your own citational practice or ethics. VRC staff are not authorities on this topic, but we are invested in educating ourselves on the topic as part of our Commitment to Ethical and Anti-Racist Digital Stewardship. We are publishing this list for two reasons: 1) in an effort to be transparent about the work that has inspired our thinking and practices as well as to document the limitations of our current understanding of the topic; and 2) with the hope that it will be of use to others in the UChicago art history community. In addition to VRC research, the items on this list were compiled with help from several Twitter threads on the topic. 

While the list below is focused on scholarly publications and not artworks, we also encourage a similar approach to thinking about the works and creators you’re writing about and citing, and whose perspectives are you including and excluding.

Selected Readings

Acknowledgements

Similar to bibliographies and citation practices, acknowledgements in scholarly publications can also be critically examined as sites where the contributions of women and people of color have been excluded, reduced, or obscured. Identifying contributors/collaborators (such as research and technical assistance) recognizes the expanse of labor sources that goes into a work.