I entered a photography contest. It did not end well.

If you’re one of the discerning worldwide audience of zero people who read this site regularly, you already know that I don’t think much of photography contests. They violate my principle that you shouldn’t be worrying about doing “good” photography, you should be concentrating on doing your photography.

To me, the idea of a photography contest is like the idea of having a contest to see who loves their dog the most. If you’re happy and your dog is happy, what’s the point of making comparisons?

Dogs, bless ‘em, don’t grasp the concept of keeping score; people grasp it all too readily, to the point that trying to score well distracts us from doing what we’re trying to do well. Contests are fine for things with well-defined objective criteria: the Formula I driving championship, say, or the biggest-pumpkin contest at the county fair. But for things that are subjective and/or personal, contest = bad.

And yet… in spite of this clear conviction, a few months ago I found myself entering a contest involving a specific kind of photography. (I’m being deliberately vague about the details of the contest, partly because this is supposed to be an object lesson and partly because I can’t afford long conversations with lawyers.)

My reason for entering was simple: One of the judges was a major photographer whom I genuinely admire, and the contest offered the possibility that those who reached the semifinals might get feedback from her about their work. I didn’t know what chances I stood of reaching the semifinals – not good, I figured, but not nil, either – so I uploaded a small group of carefully-selected photos, paid the rather hefty entry fee, and settled back to wait.

Warning Signals Flash on My Moral Compass

The contest had been organized into several categories, of which I had entered only one, and the stated plan was to announce the semifinalists at the rate of one category per week.

My category would come up later, so I could look at the first week’s semifinalists without angst. There were a lot of nice works – some really nice.

But as I scrolled, warning signals started to accumulate, like red lights on an old car’s instrument panel just before a rod goes through the block. Some entries were numbingly generic; others contained inexplicable quality lapses – and when I say inexplicable, I mean eww-what‘s-that-stuff-hanging-out-of-her-nose inexplicable.

And then came the bang. I scrolled to a semifinalist pic that clearly had been – shall we be polite and say “heavily inspired”? – by an image that I immediately recognized, a succinct, ingenious-yet-simple image that had been made about ten years ago by a highly regarded photographer. It had appeared in a widely-discussed magazine essay and later in a well-reviewed book.

Of course since then it had been ripped off kajillions of times on Instagram, so the semifinalist might plausibly plead ignorance. But it was definitely a specific person’s specific work, which had come into existence at a specific moment in time.

Was that okay? It’s not that I’m naive. I may obsess about photography, but for the past 30 years I’ve earned my living as a graphic designer. And everybody in graphic design has a “swipe file” – a collection of other people’s stuff that contains ideas you admire, ingenious solutions to problems you might encounter, and inspirations you can draw on when your creative battery needs a jumpstart.

But there are limits. Yes, you can borrow another designer’s astute typeface selection or clever graphic placement. But you can’t set “I [heart symbol] NY” in two squared-off lines of tightly-kerned American Typewriter Bold, enter it in the AIGA awards show, and expect everybody to believe you thought of it before Milton Glaser did. That’s insulting to your audience. It’s over the line.

So, I decided, was this. After a brief invocation of thanks for the fair-use-in-comment-and-criticism provision of copyright law, I screenshotted the semifinalist’s opus; located the original photographer’s magazine essay in an online archive; screenshotted the original work from that; set them up in a side-by-side graphic with relevant dates and info; and sent it off to the contest organizer.

I also included a brief message that, succinctly, boiled down to: “WTF?!”

The Black Gate of Hell Gapes Open, and a Spavined Donkey of an Argument Shambles Forth

I’ve long since outgrown the idea that I’m ever going to shoot off a snappy email to some malefactor and receive a prompt, contrite reply promising to mend his or her ways. I figured there were roughly three ways the contest organizer might respond, any of which I would find grudgingly acceptable:

• Icy silence.
• A vague promise to look into the situation, followed by icy silence.
• A terse statement that entrants had accepted responsibility for their works’ originality and it wasn’t the contest’s responsibility to police that, thank you very much, followed by icy silence.

Instead, I received a counterargument that absolutely gobsmacked me. It turned out that the organizer and I had a fundamental difference of opinion on the subject of plagiarism: I felt it was bad and shouldn’t be rewarded, whereas he contended that it doesn’t even exist.

In a condescendingly-worded rejoinder, my correspondent outlined his view that human beings all have roughly the same assortment of body parts; that there are only so many ways those parts can be organized into a photograph; that whatever arrangement you pick, somebody undoubtedly has done it before; and so there’s no point in pretending that there’s such a thing as originality. All that counts is how you execute the concept you, uh, acquired by whatever means.

I made a good-faith effort to embrace this argument, but it couldn’t take the punishment. Microwave ramen noodles are more durable.

For example, we all know that most U.S. English writing can be done with just a few symbols: 26 each of capital and lower-case letters, plus 14 widely-used punctuation marks. (Some authors do a fine job without even using the full set; check out William Saroyan’s My Name is Aram for an enjoyable example.) By arranging these bits in various ways, a writer can form the vocabulary of 8,000 to 10,000 different words commonly used in writing a novel… say, a detective story, which in turn might be a straightforward police procedural, a cozy yarn about an amateur sleuth and her talking mynah bird, or a terse drama about a principled but tormented private investigator.

But even though there are only so many ways to arrange letters into words and words into novels, you can’t simply copy out Dashiell Hammett’s The Maltese Falcon, even if you change a word here and there. You also can’t dodge the bullet by changing your protagonist’s name from Sam Spade to Harry Heart or Clive Club or Dan Diamond, or by pitting his band of eccentric adversaries in pursuit of a Portuguese Penguin or a Dominican Duck.

Certainly you can write a respectable derivative work – maybe one in which Sam is a useless drunk, and his briskly efficient secretary, Effie Perrine, has to do all the detecting behind the scenes to conform to society’s male-dominated expectations. Even if you do write that novel, though (and if you do, I want to read it) you have to accept that your work is still a satellite orbiting Hammett’s parent planet, and that’s not quite the same caliber of achievement as hewing out your own planet – even a smaller, less famous one.

Do you believe photography is any different? Well, it isn’t.

An Evil Victorian Scotsman Explains It All

By this point I knew that I couldn’t stomach being associated with a contest like this. The semifinalists in my own category hadn’t been announced yet, so I didn’t have to worry about looking like a sore loser or a saboteur.

So I shot off another email. I demanded to have my entries withdrawn from the contest, which was done immediately, and I also demanded a refund of my entry fee, which was done a few days later.

I donated the money to Doctors Without Borders in an effort to drain some of the deadness out of my soul, said goodbye to my dreams of getting feedback from the admired juror, and tried to shake off the whole experience.

And eventually I realized that the question of whether originality matters isn’t just about who should win contests. It’s about what kind of work we should aspire to do, and why.

Thomas Carlyle [1795 – 1881], a Scottish historian, essayist, and economist, was in many ways an absolutely horrible person. For example, he believed that Anglo-Saxons were inherently superior to all other nationalities and that slavery should be re-introduced to the West Indies. But Carlyle occasionally got off a good one, including this:

“The merit of originality is not novelty; it is sincerity. The believing man is the original man; whatsoever he believes, he believes it for himself, not for another.”

Or to hijack Tom’s words into my own context: Accepting the validity of knock-offs, commodified concepts, and derivative ideas doesn’t just let the wrong people win contests. It cheats us of the opportunity to do work we actually believe in.

I know you’re sick of abstraction by now, so here’s something concrete:

This is a photo of composer Igor Stravinsky, made in 1946 by photographer Arnold Newman. If you have a photography education, you probably will have seen it; if you’re just learning, you may not have, and you may not think it’s anything special. Just take my word for it that people who are into this kind of thing feel it’s kind of a big deal. Technically, it’s nothing fancy – it gets its job done very simply. The musical-notation shape of the piano lid anchors Stravinsky in the music world; his pose and expression convey that he’s serious about it; and the cheeky way that Newman has crammed him off in the corner of a space filled with geometric shapes makes for an interesting design.

Okay, well done Arnold; now let‘s talk about you. Let’s say popular local piano teacher Daphne Dalrymple has contacted you and wants to hire you to shoot a photo of her that she can use to advertise her business. She found the photo above on a Pinterest board and doesn’t know anything about its background – but she thinks it’s cute, and hey, it has a piano in it, so it’s perfect, right? She wants you to make a photo exactly like it, only with her in the lower left corner instead of that old grumpy guy. What do you do?

Well, if you’re the kind of photographer my correspondent envisions, you rub your hands together and think, “Hot dog, easy money!” After all, there are only so many ways to fit a piano lid and a torso into a photo, right?… so who cares if it’s been done before?

But I hope that instead you’re the kind of photographer who’d say this:

“Look, Daphne, that’s kind of a famous picture. We can’t just knock it off. It would be like if you sat down at a recital, played Für Elise, and then claimed you had written it yourself. Joe Schmo might not know, but all your piano friends would call you out on it.

“Besides, the real point is this: You’re not Stravinsky and he’s not you. Don’t you think it would be better if you and I spent some time and figured out how to do a photo that’s specifically about you, and your relationship to music?”

If you’re not that kind of photographer, why are you doing it at all? Don’t worry, your dog will still love you, but beyond that you’re on your own.