Blog Post #11

Are You a POTY type of photographer ?

During my camera club days back in the mid 1970s - mid 90s, competitions were the cornerstone of the camera club syllabus, and I believe they still are. They were usually held monthly and had set or sometimes open subject matter. As I was shooting everything and anything at the time I was always keen to take part and pit my ability against other club members. I had reasonable success and still have a box somewhere in the loft with small trophies in it. After a while I started to get asked to become a camera club competition judge whereby I had to travel to camera clubs and deliver my comments and assessment of the entries for a particular competition, awarding a first, second, third place and highly commended entries.

After a while I had a bit of an epiphany, and started to question what I was doing. I had realised that in my opinion competition was demoralising for some people. Hearing that their best efforts didn’t quite please the judge could ruin their evening. I remember experiencing this myself in the first camera club competition I ever entered back in the mid 1970s. The subject was “Nature”. I printed a black and white 10x8 photograph of two young pigeons in a nest. When it came up on to the easel for judging in front of the club members, the judge said, “Firstly I have to ask, are these pigeons dead?” Laughter rang around the room and yours truly was a bit red faced. I still have that photograph.

On the other hand there were people in the club that were extremely keen on these competitions and were very competitive. They tended to be the most experienced in the group and would regularly win the prizes or rack up points in the club league table. As part of my realisation that competition in photography was unhealthy I tried to get the club committee to remove regular competitions from the syllabus, and replace them with exhibitions of work where members could share their passions and projects without being driven down a road of having to shoot a particular subject that they had no desire to do. As expected though, the club decided to keep the competitions going as that’s what clubs did I suppose. If it wasn’t monthly club competitions it was inter-club competitions or national society competitions. By this time I had stopped entering and had given up judging and ranking other photographer’s work. Constructive feedback is good, but ranking photographs against each other wasn’t for me any more. I had also realised that winning a small competition with only a few entries meant nothing. The judge had to rank them as part of the remit, and it may well be that your mediocre image was less mediocre than the others so you win!

One competition I didn’t mind winning though was this one at Gryffe Camera Club back in 1987. The club had paid a visit to the Auchentoshan Distillery a few weeks previously and the distillery had put up a bottle of their whisky as a prize for the best photograph taken during the visit, as judged by the club members. This is me with my winning entry, receiving the prize from club president Gordon Miller.

It was all a bit of fun and the prize went down very nicely!

So where does POTY come in to all of this I hear you ask ? Well POTY stands for “Photographer Of The Year. A quick search on Google or a browse through photography magazines and you will see that there is a POTY for just about everything these days. I saw one recently for “Funny Wildlife POTY”! It started off with a few, but now just about every photography genre has a POTY. Don’t get me wrong, some of the images in these events are stunning and I love to look at them. Subjectivity in photography (and the arts in general), means I don’t always agree with the “expert judges” choice but I don’t tend to look at the images as being in competition with each other. If you manage to win one of the prestigious ones then it could open doors for you, but the people that win these awards are generally already at the top of their game anyway in both the taking and post processing of the final image.

Another trend that seems to be developing is the number of on-line competitions whereby if you are selected, you pay for your photo to be included in the exhibition. I did a few of these and then thought “Hold on, why am I paying someone to hang my photo in their gallery?”. There is also a web based organisation called “Guru Shots” that market themselves as “The World’s Greatest Photography Game”. Photographers upload images and people around the world vote for them. Votes can also be bought. Reducing the art of photography to a game is not for me.

The lust for competition in photography can, in my opinion, be unhealthy. I believe in photographers being able to follow their passion and presenting their work in a way that wont be judged against other work. I want my photographs to be the beginning of a conversation not something to attach a Pass/Fail label to. I don’t think competition will ever go away and POTYs are here to stay. I suppose some photographers see it as an incentive to push themselves into producing better work or trying something different. I don’t mind that so long as photographers don’t get demoralised or depressed thinking their work is no good if they don’t win or get recognition. We live in a very competitive society where instant recognition is sought out in many ways (see my Blog Post #1 on the Like culture), and reducing the art of photography to the level of being a competitive sport or game, is counterproductive in my book.

So, going forward I will continue to be very selective in where I display my images. I will obviously continue to promote my website as a way of showcasing my work and everyone can judge it accordingly if they so wish. I may dabble in the odd Salon or who knows I maybe even try a POTY, but it would have to suit my preferred genre of photography and be for the purposes of benchmarking and sharing my work, not for chasing a gong.

Thank you for reading this blog post, sorry but I don’t include a comments or “Like/Dislike” button. If you want to contact me you can do so by using the “Contact Me” facility in the website header.

Peter Degnan