Here Come de Judge
For those of you photogs who remember this line from Rowan and Martin’s Laugh-In, you’ve been with this occupation for about as long as I have. It was a regular sketch on that iconic show, performed in the first season by the very artist who realeased the song by the same name; Pigmeat Markham. Markham was an American soul and comedy singer, famous for his appearances at the Apollo Theater, and the Ed Sullivan Show.
The word “Judge” has become a particular focal point for me over the past year, made more so by the recent events involving a new supreme court justice. I won’t even grace that topic with commentary here, but I would like to share some other thoughts instead.
For better or for worse, I finally joined a photography club. I’m not really a “club” person, but the opportunity to hang with others who share my passion became something I felt I needed in my life (and a little coaxing from my honey didn’t hurt either). I naively thought that a photo club was about education and community, but have learned that it’s more about competition, something that definitely doesn’t resonate with me. But I figured, what the heck, this might be an exercise in motivation.
After a while however, I resisted participating in the monthly competitions, because I began to realize the type of photography I worked so hard to make would most likely not earn me any awards. Other members have also expressed a desire not to enter competitions, citing the narrow scope of the judging process.
But then I realized, that’s exactly why I should. Photo judges have a pre-conceived notion of what’s award-worthy and what’s not, based on competition rules and algorithms rather than the thinking and talent that goes into a photograph. When you follow such formulas and algorithms, the job is easier. Competition rules aside, judges need to expand their repertoire. To better understand trending styles and movements, and to open their minds to new work. They also need to become better at seeing, as I’ve witnessed on more than one occasion the disqualification of entries because they thought they saw something in the photo that wasn’t there.
What qualifies one to be a judge, seems to be up for debate these days, but I believe that to effectively judge photography, you must have a background in the visual arts.
So my future goal it to resume entering the monthly competitions with reckless abandon. If I feel a work is worthy of other eyes, I’ll enter it, and I really don’t care if it wins or not. My goal is to stop the judges in their tracks, and make them think. At least that’s what happened when I did win a top award with this work…
It was taken with my first mirrorless camera, back in 2009. (Yes, mirrorless cameras existed back then). The judge didn’t know quite what to make of it. Technically, it uses a full range of tones with well-defined shadow and highlight details, a splash of complementary colors (but not too saturated) and that certain je ne sais quoi. I’d like to think that the latter was the determining factor.
For me, photography is about art, and also about the experience of working in the medium. If you took some of the most famous photographic works and entered them in a club competition, they’d fail miserably. And what does that say about the state of our art?
Alfred Stieglitz once said, “In photography there is a reality so subtle that it becomes more real than reality.” In art, photography is in a category all its own. In Alfred’s time, pictorialism was all the rage because photographers had not yet fully explored what the medium could do, so they played it safe with what they knew. We’ve learned however that photography can be about the real reality, and that bears consideration just as much as the perfectly composed, captured and manipulated photo that aligns with a judge’s mental model of what photography should be.
