I wanted to call this blog ‘Nothing changes’. But a nod to a blog written by Stéphane Mousset a few years ago. Back in 2018. I wrote a blog in response to the photo competition organised by Fisheye and Pentax. At the time I didn’t want to take part in the competition. I refer you to my article written at the time.
6 years later, here I am again, bitching about a competition organised by Réponse Photo. This time I submitted 5 photos and, as I expected, they didn’t catch the jury’s eye. Disappointed ? Not really. ‘Well, a little bit if you start moaning about the competition ! ‘ I know it might seem like a bad loser to moan about something and question the legitimacy of the jury’s choice. Jury decisions are always subjective and another jury would have made a different choice. No, what continues to irritate me is that in 6 years, it’s always the same type of photos that are put forward. Below are the photos of the 3 winners and the photos of the ‘finalists’. Finally, the photos that caught the jury’s eye.
Light/Shadows, hyper graphic photos… In short, everything that I find excessively boring in Street Photography. We’re still there. The funny thing is that Réponse Photo quoted Bruce Gilden to define Street Photography: ‘If you can smell the street by looking at a photo, it’s a street photograph’. Well, sorry Réponse Photo, but this smells like mothballs at best or nothing at all. Summing up street photography in this way is very simplistic. I’m not an authority on street photography, just someone who practises it and is fed up with this watered-down version of the street that looks like it came straight out of a studio shoot. Highly polished, very graphic photos with very few people in the frame. Always this tendency to magnify loneliness in the street. Another very annoying thing.
Shit! The street’s a mess, with people bustling about all over the place. It’s the life! When I look at these photos, I feel a great sense of emptiness. They’re very beautiful aesthetically, but they’re also very empty of meaning and content. I wrote a blog about this. ‘Form vs content‘. Apart from the photo that came second, I find the others extremely boring … Gwen said to me: ‘You’ve got photos like this. Why didn’t you submit them? Quite simply because they don’t represent my work and, as I said earlier, I attach importance to form but above all to content. I can’t see myself submitting photos based on form alone.
I’m not denying these photos. They’re very graphic and the eye is drawn to what’s beautiful. I’ll pass by these same scenes again, I’ll take these photos again, but I’ll never, ever submit these photos to a Street Photography jury! Well, the last one was submitted 7 years ago and was published in a book. That’s quite a contradiction in terms… A youthful error.
I think if I’d stayed on social networks, I’d still be moaning about the same things, a bit like the Don Quixote of Street Photography. Between that and Tim Huyhn’s videos about the Street Photography Festivals, I’m thinking that nothing’s really changed and that we’re still glorifying the same crap in Street Photography …
Well put, Jeff! Been lurking on your blog for a while, and though it took me a while to really get it, as I try to figure out my own purpose photographing out in the street, I couldn’t agree more. So much of this stuff is very eye catching, and even occasionally beautiful, but ultimately just meaningless spectacle. Empty graphics, or closeups giving attention to people out on the street looking for attention… I have a long way to go in my own work, and I’m certainly guilty of trying to imitate that style at times, but hopefully less so as I get on…. Anyway, just wanted to say that I greatly appreciate your work and moreover your approach! Best— another Jeff.
No need to be ashamed of taking this kind of photos. I also take them as I said. When I started Street Photography I did a lot. That’s normal. Easy gimmick but as you grow up as a photographer, you learn to rely less on this trick. It’s complicated to produce something consistant with light and shadows. You should look at Vasco Trancoso on internet. He does a lot but there’s more than only light and shadows.
The thing is that relying on those high contrast make you eyes and mind lazy. Instant pleasure for soulless photos. Festivals and all theses contests are responsible for the fact that theses craps are being defined as what Street Photography is. And that’s sad.
Plz send me you insta or anything to get to see your work. I could use my wife’s account to check on your work! 👍
Thanks, Jeff. Yes, all the light and shadow play is very seductive, and hard to resist– and it’s fine and I’m in no position to tell anyone what to shoot. But you you are right in that it becomes cheap if that’s all you do. I found Vasco’s stuff– very good indeed. He has a great sense of color and of light, but it seems to me he uses it tastefully in the service of enhancing the content of the photos, not merely as spectacle or as the content itself. Definitely will have to spend some more time studying his stuff. I’m @jeffreytomasi on instagram if you are willing to subject yourself to that… It’s a bit of a dumping ground. I would say I’m hopeless at curating my work, but I think you’d get more or less the same quality however you might filter through all that!
In case you’re curious, I finally got my act together and put together a web site (https://www.jefftomasiphotography.com/). It’s still very much a work in progress, but at least it’s somewhat curated and is definitely a better format than insta. Maybe if I’m lucky, someone will make a massive typo on your last name looking for you and give it a visit!
Hello Jeff, I ‘m glad that you worked on your website to offer to your photos the place they deserve.
Congrats! 🎉🎉
What a load of crap. No offence to the photographers, but those winners sum up the problem with both competitions and social media. The latter is responsible for all the high contrast/grab attention shots, that really say nothing at all. I’ve taken them too, I know how easy they are. To be rewarded for lazy, uncreative photos makes no sense at all and perpetuates the problem. I’m fairly sure they would have received some superb entries from street photographers that live and breathe street. That first place one isn’t even balanced. She needs to be much further left and the boy silhouette to the right slightly. Even then, so what? The curators were clueless.
Jean Perrenet named it. Instagram shots! I’ve already written on this. Social Media is killing Street Photography… You know that almost 10.000 photos were curated! Man I would be delighted to see all of them. Just to see if I might be wrong and there were not something like 9000 surfing on the Instagram high contrast minimalist soulless photos. The thing is that people don’t read anymore. Speaking of novels. But the same for photography. How many people open a book to study master’s work? Even look at a photo to understand why the photo was made.? People just look at their feed on Instagram to scroll through all the same crap being reproduced and shared endlessly. It becomes the norm. As you said lazy work. The press or respectable magazine should educate people instead of reproducing what Instagram craves for. Shame on them
As always, I find myself agreeing with you 100% … I too have taken shots like these, but would never submit them to contests because it would be intellectually dishonest of me to do so. I’ve been on a self-imposed Instagram detox programme recently and instead I’ve been properly studying the piles of photo books I’ve acquired over the years. It’s time infinitely better-spent than doom scrolling through social media!
Intellectually dishonest. You named it! That’s exactly my feeling when I spoke about this in this blog. The thing is that the work I submit must represent myself and clearly it’s not the case of I had to submit light shadows soulless photos.
I ran through Gary Winogrand’s photos and I think of he had to submit one of his shots to a festival he wouldn’t make the cut!
They should call theses contest “Instagram contest”…