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When Icelandair launched a contest to search out “a really bad photographer”, you may need rolled your eyes. Another viral advertising stunt, one other excuse to mock individuals. But having regarded by way of the profitable photos from Blanche Mortemard’s portfolio, I feel we will truly study one thing.
Don’t get me incorrect: these images are, in technical phrases, not nice. A harbor at evening blurs right into a smear of gold streaks due to an unsteady hand. A shot of a seagull is photobombed by a human ear. The Statue of Liberty transforms right into a ghostly, smeary mess. These aren’t clever errors; they’re the form of errors most of us spent our first yr with a digital camera attempting to keep away from.
And but none of those pictures are boring. And that is the uncomfortable bit for anybody who’s invested severe cash on package and severe time on approach.
As the nationwide airline put it when launching its tongue-in-check search: “We want to prove that even the worst photographer can take great photos of Iceland.” On the face of it, that is merely a very good joke about an attractive nation being forgiving of unhealthy images. But scratch the floor a bit of, and it is also a direct problem to the concept nice pictures require nice photographers.
Look previous the technical failures by Mortemard – who was chosen from over 127,000 candidates for her sheer lack of potential – and I argue there’s one thing actually fascinating occurring in her photos.
The condensation-streaked window overlooking the snowy terrace, sunburst blasting through it, captures something a cleaner shot probably wouldn’t: the actual experience of looking out from inside a warm building into blinding Nordic light. The motion blur in the harbor shot turns ordinary boat lights into something closer to brushstrokes. Even the photobombed seagull has a kind of deadpan comic timing to it.
Being present
I’m not arguing, of course, that Mortemard secretly a brilliant photographer. But I do think her shots separate clearly two things photographers tend to bundle together: technical competence and the ability to produce a photo people actually want to look at. She’s failed at the first while stumbling, repeatedly, into the second.
And that gap poses an interesting question. Namely: how much of what we call “good” photography is technical skill, and how much is simply being present; pointing a lens at something worth seeing, and pressing the button?
As the campaign suggests, Iceland’s landscapes were always going to do a lot of the heavy lifting here. Mountains, fjords and harbor towns are forgiving subjects; they look striking even when smeared, soft or backlit, because the shapes and light are already doing the work. In contrast, the same flaws applied to a dull car park would just look like… flaws.
For anyone who’s obsessed over getting every camera setting right, it’s a useful, humbling reminder that gear and technique are tools in service of something, not the something itself.
A sense of reality
And here’s another thing these shots made me think about. In an era of AI-smoothed, algorithmically “perfect” travel imagery, technical incompetence might have accidentally become a way of making a picture feel real. Mortemard’s photos can’t be mistaken for generated content, precisely because they’re so obviously shoddy. AI can do a lot, but it can’t do that.
None of this suggests we should abandon craft, especially if we don’t have acesss to such majestic scenery. But it doesn’t remind me that – as the late Martin Parr and others have shown us – a seagull, a sunburnt beachgoer or a dropped ice cream can make for a more memorable photo than a beautifully composed but ultimately dull panorama. Mortemard didn’t mean to make that point, but Iceland, it turns out, agrees with it anyway.
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