As we approach the end of summer here in the northern hemisphere, many activities will begin to ramp up after summer vacations. One of those is the resumption of camera club meetings. Many of us find our creative outlet there, along with camaraderie and friendly competition. For the past 7 years, I’ve been a member of a competitive camera club. One of the traditional validations of photographic work is through competition. It’s actually quite natural for us to think that one of the best validations of a photograph comes from having “expert judges” assign a number to it. But I no longer think that. Here’s why.
Much of our life is about competition. In that respect, we are no different from any other species. In nature, competition is about access to food, shelter and sex. As humans, we take it just a bit further, applying our huge intelligent brains to figuring out ways to get the better of each other on a daily basis. In some things, its just fun and games, as in a family game night. In other ways, it’s malicious, as we see in the increasing number of scams being run, often on seniors like me.
We compete throughout our lives. We jostle with siblings for the best seat in the car. We get grades and rankings in school. We join sports teams to beat the other team, despite the prevalence now of “participation” awards. We apply for jobs and go through rigorous interviews and hope to be a top candidate. The words “best” and “most” and “top” are part of our everyday vocabulary. Those at the top get recognition and awards and trophies. It’s in our DNA to be competitive – it literally is.
But because we are reasoning humans, we need a way to make the winner objectively obvious to all (without inflicting objectively confirmed harm as occurs in nature). In nature, you either survive or are eaten, you have the ideal nest or not, you pass along your genes or you don’t. Humans needed a different standard (or at least one that wasn’t always so brutal). So we came up with the idea to convert everything to numbers or rankings. We’ve decided as a society that the only fair and objective way of deciding who is best is to score them, to assign a number. Think of all the situations you have been in where that has been true.
To do that, we needed a system. Our reasoning brains again said, we need a set of “rules” or “criteria” that defines how a number or ranking can be assigned. Otherwise, it’s just someone’s opinion, and there is no reason why one opinion matters more than another, right?
You see where I am going. We have taken the standards that we apply to almost every other decision in life – at least decisions that involve choices – and we have decided to also apply those standards to our art. In the amateur camera club environment, this might be seen as making the most sense. It’s familiar, and it’s fair. I bet you were waiting for me to say something else. But actually, I agree that it is the most “fair”. That is, if the objective is to rank an outcome.
If the objective is to meaningfully comment on a piece of art, then a scoring and ranking system is not even close. Lately, I’ve become totally disillusioned with the idea of ranking art. It’s not meant to be ranked and rated “objectively”. As an example, think of a situation where you have been absolutely delighted and enthralled with a visual experience, but companions with you that day were not, even saying maybe that it was a waste of an evening.
For me, the true meaning of art is how it affects each of us personally, not how many tick boxes are crossed off on a ledger. And to affect us personally, the piece has to be experienced in the context of all of our other biases, limitations and life experiences, something the rating and ranking systems adamantly seek to minimize/rule out. There is no ranking system in the world that can accommodate that context.
By way of example, one of the most meaningful photographs for me ever was actually taken by an amateur colleague of mine. Unfortunately I can’t show it because I don’t have permission. It is a photograph of a rare type of owl, on a solitary branch, photographed from behind, sleeping with its head turned toward its back and partially tucked under its wings, leaving the closed eyes and beak visible. It is presented with a high key background, suggesting but not confirming the presence of snow. The colours in the bird echo the starkness of the scene – browns and blacks and whites. The bird is at peace. Why does it affect me? Because for the two weeks prior to seeing this shot, I read about the frantic activities of birders everywhere in my area to visit and get a photo. The humans were mostly respectful, but far too numerous and in some cases, too inconsiderate to let the bird live its life. I am conflicted by the photograph and that’s why it is meaningful to me. It is also beautifully presented, which adds to my conflict.
As you grow and develop as an artist, certain experiences will resonate more with you than others. The more you practice, the more those elements will begin to appear in your work, and they will evolve and expand. So my view is that the first and best evaluation of your work has to come from you, in the context of the experiences that caused you to create the art to begin with. There are lots of ways to do that, but I have found that these three “standards” now resonate most with me:
- Examine the photograph. Are there elements in the photograph that look like mistakes rather than deliberate choices? One valuable takeaway from the ranking approach is that a good photograph has some basic features. There is a clear dividing line to me between a quality photograph and a snapshot. There are also natural aesthetics that all humans gravitate to, believe it or not. An example is odd numbers in a landscape that are somehow more aesthetically pleasing than even numbers – don’t know why. But rather than landing on rules, though, and looking for checklist things like out of focus areas, poor edge control, clutter, under or overexposure, etc., my test here is whether anything in the photograph looks like a mistake to me. If so, it’s really hard for me to get past it. Probably true for others as well.
- Does the finished photograph (after cropping and editing) make me happy? Do I physically smile when I look at it? Come on, you say. Again, as you evolve your photography, you will evolve your smile factor. Hopefully it will eventually become a “gasp” factor, where the photograph literally takes your breath away. Now there is one caveat with this method of evaluation: you were at the scene where you took the photograph. You know all of the context that allowed you to capture it. Some of that may contribute to your reaction. That’s ok. But realize that others will NOT have had the same contextual experience. If you do plan to show your photograph to others, your challenge is to help them feel the same way about it as you do, without that context. Super super hard to do. It needs to come out in the photograph itself and the way you finish and present it – you won’t be able usually to tell them the story of how you got it. My colleague’s photograph above stands on its own, even without the broader context.
- Six months after you prepared the photograph, does it still cause the same reaction in you? While we retain the memories of the experience we had when collecting the photograph, we don’t necessarily retain all of the emotion. There are certain experiences, like 9-11, that will always and forever conjure up the full range of emotional context, as well as the experience of it. But generally, emotions fade over time – you won’t remember how hard it was to climb that mountain or how cold you were standing at that glacier. But if you can look at a photograph 6 months after preparing it and still have a deep emotional response, you’ve got a winner in my view. Everything on the main page of my website (shameless plug here: Old Girl Photography) does that for me.
What should we do then, if we do want to share our photographs with others and have them share with us? Again, I don’t think competitions are it. I’m now looking for a situation where the main purpose of sharing is to describe how we feel about a photograph, to describe how it fits or doesn’t fit our emotional and experiential context, to describe what we see in the photograph and what it makes us think about.
Believe me, I know it isn’t easy to set up and manage that. It goes against everything we are taught from childhood about how we succeed. And it makes us vulnerable to misinterpretation if someone with whom we share our work has no emotional or experiential reaction at all. It’s happened to me, and I’ve done it to others. Sadly, in sharing this way, there have to be some rules around treating others with respect and as you would wish to be treated by them. And you do have to be prepared to back up your reaction, which is often the hardest part of all, simply because it is not check boxes of things present or absent. It’s about how you feel.
The most forward looking competitive clubs today have included “impact” in their checklist of elements to be scored and ranked. But typically, that accounts for 10% of the total score. And it is the hardest criteria to defend. Some clubs have abandoned or never had competitions to begin with. But they typically don’t share for the purpose of reaction and feedback either. You sit in the audience to view a slideshow and keep your mouth closed regardless of whether you internally gasped in delight, detested or had no reaction at all to the photograph. You politely applaud at the end. I do respect that some of these clubs do it for fun and to spend time together on a common interest. Like going out for a drink with your friends once a month. That’s great, and I absolutely want that drink with friends, but I also need more.
I’ve left my existing camera club and hope to try to start a group this season that will use this nebulous notion of personal impact as the only criterion in a discussion of each other’s work. Who knows, I may find that I am as reluctant as many to abandon the scoring and ranking systems that work so well for us in other aspects of our lives. But I’m excited to give it a try. Want to join me? First, I need to find those photographs in my collection that make me gasp in delight…
oldgirlphotography.ca 
Totally agree.
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