I hate photography challenges. They just don’t work for me. But I also desperately want to take part.
I have been member of photography clubs in my time. I saw them as a way to spend time with people who have been into photography for a very long time (in some cases since long before I was born) and learn from them. I also saw them as a way to be exposed to new techniques, new (to me) technology (slides!), and ideas. I value experience a lot and to me it was the right place where to be exposed to it. Remember, it was a time before the internet was huge, before social media, before Substack.
One of the things these photography clubs do is to organise and take part in federation-level competitions. It’s slightly old fashioned and dates from the days where information didn’t flow as easily as today and you had to send original photos (printed or slides) around to other clubs or to judges. The whole process took a few weeks and we often got back an audio recording of judges deliberating and choosing winners.
The advantage of these competitions was that a well respected person in the field (they would usually have a bunch of letters after their name and were fellows of some national or international photography organisation) would look at your photos and critique them. You’d learn what you did wrong, what you could have done better, and how things are done. I liked getting the critiques so that I could improve.
But I also hated taking part in those competitions and that’s in large part why I stopped being a member of any club years ago. Not because I was bad at them and I’m a sore loser, I won a lot of them, even at the regional or national level in the UK. I went as far as printing photos on slides to take part in categories I couldn’t normally because I was shooting digital (I checked the rules and it was allowed, even though I was the only one doing it). But I hated the time constraints associated with them. I absolutely couldn’t stand the fact that I had to produce something within a given timeframe.
I liked the theme constraints that made me look at things differently. “Red”, “churches”, “street market”, “kitchen”, and many others. Things I wouldn’t normally look at in my every day photography. I also liked the technology constraints that meant I had to leave my comfort zone. For example we’d have to shoot black and white, or only with a P&S camera, or slides (as I said, I cheated on that one). Once we even experimented with a magic lantern. But the time constraints were really getting at me.
And as I said before, I’m a concrete thinker. I’m not creative. To think of something I’m happy will be worthy of a collaboration or a competition, I need a lot of time. I’m not a real time thinker or improviser. I’m not good at winging things. I have to think. I need to lay things out and contemplate them. I need to make plans and execute them. Sometimes, it means that I need a lot of time before I’m happy with the plan I came up with. Sometimes I need to get an idea from someone else (my wife is good at discussing ideas). And sometimes I can’t think of something that would be good enough and I’m essentially paralised.
Competitions were monthly and I couldn’t keep up. I would have to go over my archive to find something that worked instead of taking new photos. It didn’t really solve the problem, but looking over old photos gave me inspiration. That wasn’t what the competitions were about.
Imagine what a 52 challenge or a collaboration over a week would do to me. I know they’re supposed to be “challenges”, but I just can’t cope with that format.
However, when I see people showing the results of their photography challenges, I’m jealous. I like looking at what people came up with given the remit. I’m always amazed at the creativity people show and how they interpret things. When I look at the challenge results, everything always looks professional, original, interesting. How did they come up with that idea? Where did they find that place? Why did they think of that angle I looked at every day in my house but never noticed?
I’d like to take part too. I’d like to be able to fulfil the remit of a particular challenge and then compare with others or create a publication with the results to show how much fun it was. I’d like to discuss with others what ideas we had, how we approach the challenge, how we went about fulfilling the remit, what worked and what didn’t work. I’d like to learn from their process.
The irony isn’t lost on me.
#Photography #Opinion #PhotographyTheory #Personal #IMayBeWrong