I rather enjoyed reading a post on The Online Photographer, The Worst Clichés. Of course it’s hard to avoid clichés (particularly if you are a French photographer) and sometimes its easy to feel along with Ecclesiastes “there is nothing new under the sun.” There are only 36 subjects listed in the article, although quite a few more have already been added in the readers’ comments.
I have mixed feelings about some of them (though I’d be happy never to see another cat or food picture on Facebook.) But familiar subject matter can be an incentive to find a different way to treat it. There might even be an interesting way to photograph a cat, though I doubt it.
Certainly the advice to ‘look through the viewfinder and if you’ve seen it before don’t bother to take the picture’ is generally good, if a little harsh. Back in 1964, the great graphic designer, photographer and teacher Alexey Brodovitch (1898-1971) wrote some notes for Photography magazine, which I first read when they were republished by Creative Camera in 1972. You can read them – and much else besides – on Roy Hammans‘s great web site Photography@Weeping Ash in Alexey Brodovitch Talking, and he has much to say about clichés and what makes a good photograph.
I don’t entirely share Brodovitch’s views. As a documentary photographer, though the image is important it cannot be divorced from content. It isn’t enough for an image to be visually novel, it must also have something to say. And importantly, we can’t all be a “Tony Ray-Jones, John Benton Harris, Hiro, Lillian Bassman, Diane Arbus, Eve Arnold, Richard Avedon, Lisette Model, Gary Winogrand” (as Hammans lists some of Brodovitch’s best-known students) but we can still make images that are meaningful and worthwhile.
