The Smartful Codger – the dark art of judging photographs
Mark Greenland
2019
Introduction
You, the judges, are responsible for the state of amateur photography in this State. If you reward photographs which are thoughtful or in which the author has gone the extra mile, the general standard will improve; if you reward only lawabiding prettiness, many photographers will go elsewhere. Ultimately, you will be held accountable for the nature and standard of work in camera clubs. This is the underlying theme of this paper.
Judges as “consultants”
[WAPJA rubric]
The days when the role of a judge was simply to pick winners, have gone. With the advent of the GSB (gold/silver/bronze, to which I refer collectively as “metal”) method of assessment, judges are expected to evaluate the intrinsic merits of images, not merely compare them.
People join camera clubs to be educated, and listening to a competent judge’s commentary is the very best way to learn. So nowadays, judges are primarily teachers. Since many photographers at club level are at least as advanced as the judges, I prefer to think of judges as “consultants” rather than “teachers”.
The GSB method, together with the 8 stage WAPJA rubric for assessment, has led to a fundamental change in the way judges work. Whereas in days of old it was common to hear photographs evaluated in terms of their conformity to technical rules or values (like the “rule of thirds”), the modern approach is to consider how successfully the image communicates. (The rubric reserves gold and silver for “art photography” which in my view emphasizes communication).
The technicalities of the medium are relevant only to the extent that they serve or impede the author’s apparent ambition.
Judges need to be collaborators in the artistic process. This requires judges to understand the purpose of the image and be able to suggest other (though not necessarily better) ways the purpose could have been achieved. Judges have to be able to imagine how the image could have looked, handled differently.
Judges have to help the author to strive for flare, not just technical competence. In this way, judges will drive steady improvement in amateur photography.
While this is a stirring prospect, it does impose a much greater burden on judges. No longer can you justify a low score with a casual complaint that the centre of interest is not on an intersection of thirds; now you have to explain how the composition has failed to carry through the author’s apparent intention, and how the composition could be improved. This requires analysis, which requires more time and concentration. Judges have to be smart, educated and fit!
There are, of course, numerous ways in which an image’s impact could be affected. For example:
Mono vs colour
Cropping
Lighting
Choice of format
Background
Differential sharpness/softness generally
Interpretation of movement
Juxtaposition of tones and colours
Perspective
Timing
Exploitation of pattern and text
Shadow/highlight detail
Facial and body expression
Colours/casts
A judge must, almost instantly, find his or her way to the important issues and be able to express them. One of the most important considerations is composition. In this respect, a judge must quickly recognize the bone structure of the image – that is, the lines colours and tones which attract the eye – and assess not only whether the author has controlled them to good effect, but also whether and how they might have been better.
Another important consideration at amateur level is underediting. There is still a view among some photographers that post production is the devil’s work and must be minimized or risk going blind. Sadly, this means that much great potential is not realized. Judges have to be able to imagine and explain how the image could have looked, if the author had just embraced imagination and experimentation.
This is not to say that the judge should try to guess whether the image was “set up”. The judge must assess the work placed before him or her without bias based on authenticity or lack of it, unless of course the image is competing in a subject (such as nature) which expressly demands authenticity. Even then, judges need to be very careful not to be distracted from their true role by entertaining doubts about how the image was made. A judge who fails to consider the impact of the image as it stands, fails.
Rules
“Rule 6: there is no… rule 6” – Monty Python
Despite having been mauled by judges on innumerable occasions over the years, I have never been told why photographers impose on themselves so many “rules” which never troubled painters. For example, why do photographers insist on catchlights in eyes, when painters (no doubt noticing what they actually see) often do without them?
[Rembrandt: The Apostle Peter Standing]
Why do we place so much importance on “centres of interest”, and why do we insist on putting centres of interest on intersections of notional lines dividing the image into thirds? Yes, ancient Greeks were interested in the “golden mean” and the Fibonacci number on which it is based, but a brief stroll through an art gallery will soon demonstrate that painters don’t allow themselves to be so constrained.
[von Menzel]
They are more interested in the image’s bone structure. They are guided by their subject matter, not pre conceived rigid rules, and photo judges should take the same approach.
Much nonsense is heard in camera clubs about “balance” in composition, but in truth if composition were a matter of equally weighting different parts of the frame, the true meaning of the image would be subordinated to a one-size-fits-all formula. No painter would accept this: the subject matter at hand is all that matters.
[Rembrandt: Landscape with a Stone Bridge]
[Pissarro: Jeune Paysanne a sa Toilette]
The most frustrating experience for a photographer is a judge who treats judging as a matter of running through a checklist including such favourites as:
but never mentions the actual intent of the image. Judging like this is no longer acceptable, if it ever was.
Rules lead to uniformity, which is the enemy of creativity. Let’s take the hard road, and actually analyse the image rather than making it conform to repressive pre conceived ideas which might have been helpful in some cases but should never have hardened into rules.
[Las Meninas] Art as Therapy, de Botton, p51
[Mona Lisa]
[B&W magazine issue 130, p51]
Why was this submitted?
Instead of beginning your judging with a survey of the failures of the image to meet the rules, here’s an idea: what about starting by trying to answer the question why was this submitted for judging?
[Siobhan in my Mirror] Art as Therapy, p28
[Fencepost]
[Harley Weir image, p47 Photog on Photog]
Of course, sometimes the author will have made the point of the image just too hard to extract. Another skitter through the art gallery will find many examples of this. The recent exhibition of Andrew Nicholls’ Hyperkulturaemia show is a great example. Even with the benefit of a written explanation, it still came off as a Mapplethorpe style indulgence in penis waving, whatever the artist professes to have had in mind.
It is a tragedy that so much cant is devised to attribute significance to work that is basically unjustifiable. So many US collectors are driven to spend obscene sums on images that would fail dismally at a monthly camera club competition.
So you, the judge, have to have the courage to admit it when you have been provided with insufficient information to interpret an image. Just in case you’re the only person in the room who doesn’t get it, you should maybe not call out the Emperor for wearing no clothes, but you can honestly admit that you’ve tried, and when even the title doesn’t clue you in, you can apologetically give up.
[California Mirage] Photographers on Photography , p25
Sometimes, to understand why an image was taken and presented, you need to know the author’s agenda. It may be that the image (although presented as a competition picture) is really part of a body of work for exhibition.
In “An Analysis of Judging” by Dr E R Sethna (published in the journals of both the Royal Photographic Society and the Photographic Society of America), the author states:
“It is neither essential nor important for a judge to find out what the author of the picture was trying to communicate. What matters is what feelings and thoughts it engenders in the viewer – the judge”.
This came from a very insightful article, but I can’t agree with this passage. If it is not immediately obvious why the image was presented for judging, the judge must consider what might have been intended by the author, since the image may have little or no merit without the message, and the author will be frustrated and disappointed if you don’t at least show that you’ve tried to “get it”.
What if you were asked to judge a typical school photo of a child?
[school photo]
It could be a trap to make you look silly! If you began with the question why was this submitted, you might suggest that it could be a painful reminder of a lost child, or a nostalgic reminder of lost youth, and life wasted. It could speak of the development of every person’s life, and rites of passage. It could be a celebration of youth, and a trigger for wondering what did or will lie ahead for this child. What misfortunes and disappointments will he or she have to endure? Does the image draw your attention to the vulnerability and innocence of youth?
(A learned art critic, Herbert Read, stated in The Meaning of Art (1931) that a portrait sublimates into a work of art when it conveys something about other humans. Any image which triggers some association might claim to be art).
On the other hand, you might just say that it’s a record shot which would please the parent of the child but the image isn’t suitable for competition, because it isn’t any different from a million other student shots.
A good judge would recognize and mention that either approach might be correct, but since the author hasn’t provided enough information to decide which approach to take, you can’t impute the favourable interpretation to the image. You might suggest that if the image had been treated with a suitable texture, or if it had been assembled in a montage with other memorabilia, the message might have been clear enough, but as it stands, it can’t win metal. This would be much better than just saying it’s a record shot, without mentioning the favourable possibility, and you wouldn’t be caught out ascribing significance to a shot which couldn’t support it. The author might be disappointed that you refused to impute deeper significance to the image, but would respect your judgment because you considered that possibility and had a good reason for rejecting it. The fault would then lie with the author, not you.
Well seen
Anyone who has sat through a camera club competition has heard the judge say “well seen”. What exactly does this mean, and why does it so often accompany a mediocre score?
I understand it to mean that the author gets credit for noticing the potential for a photo in a scene where many people would not have noticed anything special, but you don’t get much credit for it. It’s a sort of begrudging kiss of death; the judge is reaching for something positive to say to avoid total negativity.
So let’s consider this question of whether and why an author should get credit at all for just noticing something.
First, one doesn’t need to be a photographer, or indeed any kind of artist, to notice something attractive or remarkable, and yet so much of photography (and art in general) is an attempt to bring something to the attention of the viewer. The author says to the viewer: “Hey look at this – makes you think doesn’t it?” This is the reason we have photojournalism, travel, sport and nature images, and a good deal of landscape and portraiture too.
But what’s the difference between accurately recreating a landscape or travel scene, and on the other hand, a mural painted on the side of a building, or a sculpture? Why do judges reject the reproduction of an existing artwork, but accept the reproduction of a sunset?
Usually a judge will say of a photo of an artwork that the photo gets no credit beyond what the photographer has contributed, but can’t the same be said of any landscape?
In that article by Dr E R Sethna, he says:
“There is a tendency at present that anything that is not considered as ‘creative’ or ‘contemporary’ has no place in photography. It would be a mistake to take this extreme view. How often judges say that what is good in a photo existed in the subject matter and that the photographer only recorded it. That is a very narrow view. Different photographers interpret the same subject differently and some better than others and good judging requires taking that into consideration. To give an analogy; if a musician plays a classical masterpiece one could not say that he only played what was composed by someone else. We give full credit to how he has interpreted the composer’s work. Similarly a good photographer interprets in his own inimical (sic inimitable) way the favourable attributes in the subject he photographs.
However, one has to admit that what could be described as a ‘record’ photo and what I would call an ‘interpretive’ photo would have to be of a very high standard to evoke as much response as the ‘creative’ work in which there is a greater input of the photographer’s creativity”
There is merit in this view, but it doesn’t entirely address the problem. Let’s say you have to judge two images; one is a perfect reproduction of a painting (by someone other than the photographer) of a tree; the other is of a real tree. The first image will usually fail in competition, because the impact of the image was not created by the photographer, but by the painter. The second image will fare better. That is appropriate, because it was the photographer’s idea to shoot the tree.
What if the first image were of a sculpture, rather than a painting? Now the subject is three dimensional, and the way it is lit is important, as is the background and the placement of the sculpture within the frame. Now the photographer’s interpretation will come into play, and the photograph can be judged for itself not for the merit of the original sculpture.
According to received photographic wisdom, this is why a landscape photograph can compete, even though the author does not create the subject or even light it. What is rewarded is the composition, and the editing of tones and brightness. This idea is expressed by Dr Sethna as follows:
“the photographer’s creative input, whether achieved at the creative stage or by subsequent manipulation, is far more important than the recorded image. This does not imply that photos must be manipulated to be creative, but rather that they must reflect the personal input of the photographer by providing an image onto which the viewer can project his own thoughts, fantasies and imaginations aroused by the image”.
With respect, this passage leaves me unsatisfied. I can’t escape the stubborn fact that many great landscapes were just presented to the authors, who only had to be there to record them, like James Boswell jotting down Samuel Johnson’s pronouncements. This sharply focuses our attention on what exactly judges are rewarding. Why do we give high marks to a spectacularly lit photo of mountains in Torres del Paine? If we say it’s the composition and editing, I think we’re just deceiving ourselves: it’s the spectacular subject which really makes us open our GSB wallets. Yes, the author’s thoughtful arrangement of the subject matter, and bold editing might contribute, but the same attention to a tree at Lake Monger won’t have the same impact. Aren’t we really giving the author credit for something the author did not create?
This is a difficult question on which reasonable minds may differ, but one possible answer is that the author receives credit for noticing the subject’s potential to excite the viewer, and presenting it to the viewer. It doesn’t matter very much that the medium was photography, because ultimately the artistic endeavour is to communicate an idea or emotion to a viewer. A music score is just marks on a page (or an idea in someone’s head) until the musician translates it into the viewer’s experience; a sunset is just a physical phenomenon until a painter or photographer appreciates it and shows it to someone else. As I mentioned above, the photographer says to the viewer: “Hey look at this – makes you think doesn’t it?”
Similarly, portraits are usually more successful if they are of people whom the viewer wants to see, like celebrities or people with characterful faces. The author doesn’t create the attractive feature, the author is only the entrepreneur who brings the experience to the viewer.
Of course, some pictures are very much created by the photographer; the interesting look on the subject’s face, the still life arranged by the author, the abstract or composite created by the author in the computer. The author should really get double credit for such images, but judges can’t enquire into who made the subject grimace, or who arranged the still life or who had the idea for the composite. In the end, the author gets credit for communicating the idea or emotion to the viewer, so photographers look for emotive subject matter, hoping to hitch a ride to glory like a filmstar’s agent. (The word “pimp” narrowly missed out on a role in that sentence!)
So, photographers should not feel damned with faint praise when told that their image was “well seen”. What that really means is that the only reason the image failed was that the presentation of it failed; for example, the exposure was bad, extraneous stuff spoiled the subject’s impact, the subject was not well framed etc etc. In other words, the subject was good and would have got the author credit, if the author had not spoiled the effect by distracting the judge with technical inadequacy. The food was great but the restaurant sucked!
This view requires us to review the problem created by photos of artworks. If the photographer gets credit for noticing the subject and competently presenting it to the viewer, why does he not get credit for an image of a painting? I suggest that this is because if the photographer presents nothing more than the painting, he/she is doing no more than the painter did – it was the painter who noticed the subject and presented it. The photographer is doing no more than noticing what the painter did.
Bias
Often, associations are triggered by images you judge. It is typical of art to do this, but what if the image triggers a negative association to which you are unusually sensitive? (I know a judge who can’t even look at spider shots).
Before you insist that a judge has to put aside such reactions, in the interest of objectivity, remember that by the same token, the judge would have to put aside positive reactions as well. Where do we draw the line between reactions you’re intended to have and those you should disregard? Would an artist want a viewer to disregard the way an image made him or her feel?
In my view, a degree of subjectivity is inevitable, and authors have to take the good with the bad: sometimes an idiosyncratic reaction works in their favour and sometimes it doesn’t. That’s life.
Still, when judging, we have to recognize our natural bias in favour of some subject matter and against other subject matter. It’s dispiriting to authors, and unprofessional, for a judge to admit to a bias, whether for or against, since people won’t know whether – or how effectively – you will resist your bias.
A judge has to bear in mind that art has the capacity to help us see through different eyes, and the judge has to strive not to lose objectivity. We have to keep an open mind. It’s no good saying that you simply adore pictures of babies or that you’re not a sports person, or you hate insects.
Subjects that you would not normally find attractive might, if examined with an open mind, commend themselves to you. For example, images like the urban landscapes of Andreas Gursky, the water towers of Bernd and Hilla Becher, the mineworkers of Sebastião Salgado, the industrial landscapes of Edward Burtynsky and the conservation images of Nick Brandt would probably surprise a camera club judge, but hopefully you would encourage the author.
In my view, judges should strive to respond intelligently to images which are not typical of club work because only by encouraging such work will we progress from camera club clichés. If judges made a particular point of being enthusiastic about work which is clearly intended to be unusual, you could transform photography in this State.
I hate to hear a judge say of something which is a little obscure, that the judge doesn’t get it, and therefore can’t reward it. OK, you may not get it, but be very careful not to crush the delicate green shoots of an emerging talent!
Abstracts
[City abstract]
I suspect that Judges are afraid of abstracts. When presented with one, they usually sigh, take a deep breath and begin by saying “So, this is an abstract….” followed by a pause which eloquently whispers: I don’t have a clue what to make of it. Almost without exception, abstracts fail to attract the higher metal.
I can only hope this is not because judges are discomfited by the absence of a recognizable subject.
There are various reactions to abstracts. One is to try to identify the original subject. This is an instant fail for a judge! You have failed to understand that the author has sought to sublimate the original subject into an impression. The author specifically does NOT want to present a record of a physical subject, so don’t try to reverse engineer it! Just go with what you’ve been given.
Another reaction is to say that the image (or usually only part of it) reminds you of something. This is perfectly natural, and quite consistent with a judge’s role, but please don’t make the mistake of leaving your assessment at that. When faced with an abstract, you must explain your emotional response to the image as a whole. This is true of all images of course, but especially important in abstracts. Your response might be to the colours, or to the distribution of bright and dark tones, among other things.
If the image makes no connection with you (it doesn’t “speak to you”) then move away from it, and view it from a different distance and angle. Look at other things for a while and return to it. Squint at it. Open your mind and try to receive the image without preconceptions. Imagine how it would look day after day on a wall in your house or office, at different sizes. If it still doesn’t speak to you, try to imagine how it would be received by others.
Abstracts are like music which lacks a beat, recognizable words, instruments and structure. They are like ambient or chill music which just washes over the listener. This can be beautiful beyond words, jarring or just boring. All the author asks is that you give the image a chance, and not mark it down just because it doesn’t conform to what you were expecting. If you’ve given it a fair hearing, and it makes no case, then be honest and say it doesn’t speak to you, but you approached it with an open mind. The author would be unreasonable to expect any more. Try not to discourage future abstract work.
Conclusion
Judges must never forget the power they have, both to crush the tentative first steps towards creativity, and to stimulate much needed progress in amateur photography. If judges approach the task with open minds, willingness to seek out the author’s intention, and the capacity to give positive guidance, they will – like the careful farmer – cultivate a richer and more rewarding crop, to the benefit of all. Your contribution will shape the future of amateur photography. It’s a great opportunity waiting to be seized!