The Online Photographer

This is partly tongue-in-cheek, but, if I were constructing a contest for smartphone pix qua smartphone pix—that is, pictures that embody what entrants think smartphone cameras are good for or best at—I wouldn't use that dull earthbound standard list of cliché "subjects." You know, landscape nature people architecture abstract etc. etc.* My categories might look more like:

• Serendipity
• Emotion
• I never want to forget...
• Us and ours
• Oddities, strangeness, and mystery
• Casual intimacy
  
• A picture I never would have taken if I didn't have my phone in my pocket/purse
• Poetical, lyrical, lovely
• This is what I have access to and not many people do
  
• Weird and wonderful
• Nothing much of anything but still, I like it
• Selfie
• Fly on the wall
• Whimsicality and capriciousness
• Look what happened
• Bad picture good
• Note to self
• Fun
• Funny
• Personal meaning
  
• Color/light
• Lucky capture!
• Chance and accident
• My dear love
• I think this works. Does this work?
  
• A picture I'll never delete
• Miscellaneous
• Add your own

The categories would be purely optional and entrants wouldn't even have to identify which category they think their pictures fall into.

I'm being tongue-in-cheek.

But only partly. Shouldn't categories be enabling and freeing, rather than reductionist and stultifying?

Mike

*I'm actually quite tired of that standard subject list. I'm sure you've seen its variants many times over many years. I sure have. I've never liked it, not from the start. It's a thuddish, cloddish, simpleminded way to think about photographs, the words tending to funnel viewers' conceptions into reductionist bins in unhelpful ways. I guess I'd even go so far as to say I hate it, in that current demotic, vernacular usage of "hate." Like I hate the labels on the back covers of books that show what section of bookstores they belong in. Necessary, maybe, like street addresses are necessary—in Jonathan Swift's time, street addresses didn't exist, and letter-writers had to simply try to describe where the destination was—but just not a helpful way to think about books or to encourage readers to think about books. Then again, my bookstore would probably have to shelve eight copies of Mockingbird: one each in fiction, race, legal, thriller, coming of age, women authors, social issues, and books made into movies. The following might make a good contest: whimsical bookstore categories for famous books.

I'd make a great bookshop proprietor, except that no one would ever be able to find anything in my shop. Which might be the way it should be—browse, and let a book find you!

Book of Interest:

Photographs Not Taken: a collection of photographers' essays, edited by Will Steacy (Daylight Books; Second Revised ed. edition, 2012). Recommended by Mike Chisholm, who has good taste. This is a link to Amazon from TOP.

Original contents copyright 2020 by Michael C. Johnston and/or the bylined author. All Rights Reserved. Links in this post may be to our affiliates; sales through affiliate links may benefit this site. As an Amazon Associate I earn from qualifying purchases.

(To see all the comments, click on the "Comments" link below.)
Featured Comments from:

Kenneth Tanaka: "You forgot a few.

• I’ll Never Eat That Again
• Suspicious Moles
• My Ex’s Body Ink
• I Used to Have Hair There
• I Never Had Hair There Before
• What’s His/Her Name?
• Restaurant Checks I Couldn’t Read
• My Feet"

Kenneth Wajda: "Hi, Mike. I'm with you. Your bookstore comment made me think of this comedian's line: 'I went to a record store. They said they specialized in hard-to-find records. Nothing was alphabetized.' —Mitch Hedberg."

Stan B.: "You can call them whatever you want, but they will eventually mutate into the usual: categories, subject matter and...results. Every competition theme also has a sub-theme based on the judges' personal tastes or the overall gestalt that gradually develops within the vast majority of entries. Can't prove it, of course, but I think sometimes the more worthy and creative outliers are rejected instead of elevated so as not to upset that prevailing gestalt."

DZ: "In my view the iPhone is plenty good at landscapes and other traditional categories of photography. But move the discussion from what cameras are good at to what photography is and this is a really good idea. What exactly do you see when you look through the viewfinder? Do you see earth and sky? Or do you see something less obvious?

"I once had a category of photographic thinking in my portfolio called Interior states. It was intended to feature people deeply into the moment—folks momentarily lost to others who'd moved off, even briefly, to some interior place. As I studied my own photographs in this regard, I realized the interior state I was seeing was loneliness. So even though I was sort of along the way to your suggestion, I’ve changed my description of this category from Interior states to Lonely. It’s a one-off test of your suggestion that we sharpen the way we look at photographs. It also means the next time I go out to make photographs, I may be looking for only the lonely."

KeithB: "Because I work at Sandia National Labs, I have a lot of 'This is what I have access to and not many people do,' but I am not allowed a camera to photograph it!"

Rick Graves: "A photography club that I am a member of has a lengthy list of 252 photography topics. And that's not an all-inclusive list. Too much to list them all in this comment, I'm sure. Of course, as with any such list, some topics will be considered by some folks as just plain awful. If you want a copy, just let me know via email."

JimH: "How about:

• Best photo recovered from a dead tourist's phone after they fell off the cliff behind them or was run over by traffic
• You're my girlfriend—I'd never show that to anyone else!
• Tourist selfie stick
• Sure you can take pictures in the dark
• Photos that led to police being convicted
• Recovered by Israeli spy software
• Taken just before subject smashed photographer in face for taking their photo
• Photos taken of shoes/feet/legs by mistake pushing wrong button
• Embarrassing photos recovered by repair person
• Most shared over Internet

"And the top prize for: WHAZZAT?"

Zyni Moë (who trembles as if she were mad): "Better categories for all photographs (or all other things): those belonging to the Emperor; embalmed ones; trained ones; suckling pigs; mermaids (or sirens); fabled ones; stray dogs; those included in this classification; those that tremble as if they were mad; innumerable ones; those drawn with a very fine camel hair brush; et cetera; those that have just broken the vase; those that from afar look like flies."

Mike replies: Borges!

V.I. Voltz: "My friend, the late W.G. Sebald, said he wanted all the categories for his great and strange work The Rings of Saturn, as a mechanism for avoiding categorisation. Publishers, however, only permit two, to avoid authors adding many categories in the mistaken belief that it will increase their number of books on the shelf. Now The Rings of Saturn is usually categorised by the anodyne but appropriate 'Non fiction prose.'"

Mike replies: Were you the one who told me that Sebald used to read my work? Biggest compliment I've ever gotten.

Mike Ferron: "You forgot 'Multiple, Accidental Photos and Videos Taken Inside Your Jeans Back Pocket.' I could win this."

Benjamin Marks: "I would like to see the entrant to a photo contest where the only requirement was to show a type of picture we have never seen before or where a familiar type was subverted. Call it a category of non-categories. I took a picture like that of the Brooklyn Bridge once—no kidding. My father, to whom I gave the one print I made of that negative, was an art dealer and an incidental a fan of the Brooklyn Bridge (he had hundreds of images of it), framed my print and hung it in prominently in his living room. Being chosen by Szarkowski for MoMA's walls could not have made me more proud."