On competition

I started life with hardly a competitive bone in my body. A couple of years of pee wee football and, later, a couple of years of swim team in high school. I was always a better speller than anyone in my school, but I simply had no stomach for the spelling bee. Consequently, I have very few ribbons and trophies like lots of other guys I know.

Once I joined my photography club, and I was feeling around for a place, I found myself seeking validation in a way I'd never done before. "What do you think of this?" "Could you give me some feedback...?" We have a monthly competition on our website, so I started entering. I won several first place awards and didn't get votes on a whole lot more. I entered county fair competitions, TV morning mugshot competitions. Anything to get some validation that I took good photographs. I found a competitive side of myself I'd never known before. But something wasn't quite right. I submitted images that I knew, without a doubt, deserved at least a third, if not a second or first place award. They were, in my opinion, that good. And yet many of them did not place. And this feeling started growing in me that I wasn't really getting any valuable feedback, win or lose.

Why do people go into photography? Lots of reasons. Some are surely competitive. For most, it's more likely that there's an artistic or aesthetic drive at work. For my first 35 years or so behind a camera, I imagined myself as an artist waiting to be discovered. This competition thing didn't really fit. I started noticing what types of images won competitions. More often than not, there was bold color and contrast in the winning entries, mine included. The question that started gnawing at me was whether a photograph had to win an award to be a truly "good" photograph. I had my doubts.

This morning, I had occasion to read one of Allain Briot's essays, Art and Facts, where he helped put it all into perspective for me: "Art is not a race, a match, a competition. Art is inspiration, skill, talent, personal expression and yes, if you ask, luck as defined in my essay Being an Artist."

Winning a competition entails appealing to some judge's preconceptions of what's good, whether he bases his conclusion on what he considers measurable facts (technical merit) or on emotional impact. Creating art, as Allain pointed out so well, requires being attuned to your own feelings and vision.

I'm going to enter one final image in our monthly competition. You be your own judge. I'll let you know how it fares. I'd also enjoy hearing your thoughts on photo competitions.