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Indicate in your caption that you have edited the image. For works that will be published, ensure that you have been granted the rights to do so by the rights holder.
Say, for example, that you have used this digital image of Berthe Morisot’s nineteenth-century painting Reading in your paper:
But instead of inserting the image as is, you have replaced the book in the painting with a picture of a twenty-first-century novel. Your caption might read as follows:
Adapted from Berthe Morisot; Reading; 1873; The Cleveland Museum of Art, www.clevelandart.org/art/1950.89.
For more on citing captions,
Cite an image used in a PowerPoint presentation or Web project the same way you would cite it in a printed paper. See the example in our post on citing a screenshot or frame capture in a caption. As the post explains, if the image is merely illustrative, provide full publication details in a caption. But if you refer to the source of the image elsewhere, the caption should provide only enough detail needed to key to a works-cited-list entry. The list of works cited may be included as the final slide or as the last page of the Web project.
To cite an infographic, follow the MLA format template. If the infographic does not have an official title, provide a description of it. If you link directly to a PDF of the infographic, it is usually sufficient to cite the PDF as a standalone work and not one contained by the Web site hosting the link:
Infographic. Johns Hopkins Center for a Livable Future, www.foodspanlearning.org/_pdf/lesson-plan/JohnHopkins_info_0714.pdf.
If the infographic is embedded in another work, such as a blog post, one option is to refer to the infographic in your text and create a works-cited-list entry for the work in which the infographic is included:
The 100 Most Popular Keywords on Google infographic shows that the term most searched for during the twelve-month period ending 1 June 2018 was weather (Brumberg).
When citing an image reproduced in an article on a Web site, you can generally refer to it in your text and then key the reference to a works-cited-list entry for the article. In the example below, the image, reproduced in an article on a Web site, is described in prose, and the name of the article’s author is provided in a parenthetical citation that keys to the works-cited-list entry:
A recent article summarizing a study of Leonardo da Vinci’s Mona Lisa shows a scan of the original Mona Lisa so that readers can judge for themselves whether or not the woman in the painting is smiling (Daley).
When you are citing an image reproduced in a book, it is usually sufficient to refer to it in your text and create a works-cited-list entry for the book as whole. In the example below, the image, printed in a book on a page with no page number, is described in prose, and the figure number is given parenthetically:
One political cartoonist working during the 1919 Paris peace talks depicted Bolshevism as an aggressive, predatory hawk, and the peace treaty as an unknowing dove (MacMillan, fig. 6).
Work Cited
MacMillan, Margaret. Paris 1919. Random House Trade Paperbacks, 2001.
Illustrative visual material other than a table—for example, a photograph, map, drawing, graph, or chart—should be labeled Figure (usually abbreviated Fig.), assigned an arabic numeral, and given a caption:
Fig. 1. Mary Cassatt, Mother and Child, Wichita Art Museum.
The label and caption ordinarily appear directly below an illustration and have the same one-inch margins as the text of the paper. Visit our Formatting a Research Paper page to learn more about including tables, figures, and musical illustrations in papers. You can also read our post on punctuating captions.
Page 49 of the MLA Handbook demonstrates how to create a works-cited-list entry for an artwork viewed firsthand at a museum. Include the name of the artist, the title of the work, the date of composition, and the name of the museum along with the city in which the museum is located:
Bearden, Romare. The Train. 1975, Museum of Modern Art, New York.
The medium of publication and materials of composition, if important to your discussion, could be included at the end of the entry as optional elements.
If you viewed the same painting on the museum’s Web site,
Published 29 September 2016