Regular readers of this column will know that I don’t have a great deal of time for Photography Awards, competitions and juried shows. In particular those which are seem to be more about making money for the organisation that is running them – and there are quite a few of those around who regularly e-mail me about their contests.
I won’t name names, if only for legal reasons, but it is generally pretty obvious if you check the organisations web pages and look for the results of any previous contests which ones are entirely spurious. But I feel that even some otherwise reputable organisations sometimes look upon running a competition as a method of raising funds more than anything else.
Some contests are at least very close to fraudulent. It might be flattering to your ego to become the ‘XYZ Master Photographer of the Year’ but can be totally meaningless if the XYZ contest is one that nobody ever hears about and has absolutely no credibility in the photographic world. And if XYZ only publishes enough copies of their awards book to send out to the winners and holds a exhibition for a day in a hotel to which nobody is invited it won’t make a great dent in the $30 they got from each of the 5,000 photographers who sent in a picture.
Various organisations have often looked on competitions as a cheap way of getting images to use on their web sites and even in advertising. It’s always vital to read the rules, especially any small print about what rights you are giving away by entering.
The most common problem is ‘rights grabs’; if the rules allow more than the organisation running the contest to use the winning images in publicity in connection with the competition and exhibitions of work from it, then a warning bell should ring loudly. If, as in the first I found in a web search it says something like “All entries may be used for future marketing campaigns and activity by XXX and its partners” you can be clear there is something very wrong.
But most of the well-known awards and contests – even when they charge an entry fee – are actually at least in part about putting money into photography by actually giving it to the photographers, which is in principle a good thing, though sometimes they seem to give it to the wrong photographers.
I have occasionally in the past entered for some contests, and put work in for juried shows, and have had a little success, though nothing I’d ever feel worth putting on a CV.
I’ve even put work into one or two which required me to pay for entry, either because the amounts involved seemed reasonable or because they were offering something in return – like a catalogue or DVD even to those unlucky to be chosen. And I chose that word ‘unlucky’ deliberately, because often the judging process, or certainly the short-listing, for some is carried out in a way that precludes any real consideration of the work.
Lewis Bush in his Disphotic blog on visual culture a few days ago published a post
The Transparent Jury and the Opaque Prize, looking in particular at the Aperture Paris Photobook awards shortlist. The immediate object of his attention was the fact that one of the judges, David Campany, himself had a book in the five listed. After he wrote the piece Aperture did point out that Campany withdrew from the panel during the consideration of his work, but, as Bush writes:
A pre-existing jury from which one member briefly exempts themselves briefly might feel a lingering sense of loyalty to one of their own, or just as possible depending on the individual dynamics, a sense of antagonism. How can a jury knowingly judge something closely connected to one of their own and treat it in the same way as the work of a normal contributor?
Like Bush, I have no argument with Campany or with the work that was short-listed, though I think Aperture put him in an invidious and insupportable position.
Photoshelter published an interesting blog post that looked at a few contests and weighed up the pros and cons of entry, giving them a rating from A to D. For a slightly less favourable view you can read The Biggest Scam In Photography (and the comments to it) and Why You Should Avoid Paid-For Photography Competitions.
