What Is It With Dykes and Guitars?

I've been messing about in Flickr groups quite a lot recently. Through a local contacts group I've come across a few interesting people. There's also plenty of ones that I would never bother meeting, but that's the same in the wider world as well, I guess.

Anyway, one of the better local contacts invited me to join another group. It's sadly addictive - a group where a theme or technique is decided by anyone, and then three photos need to be submitted to match that theme. After that, the members vote on the submitted photos. To me it's a great way to review other works and learn more about what I like. Also I've submitted a few and been surprised by some of the results. You only need to get five votes to win a round, but that's five votes that I had no idea were out there for the things I see and take pictures of.

Most of the challenges are decided by the first person to post a photo in that round. Usually somebody pops up and chooses "sunset" or "rocks" or "rusty" and really doesn't put too much thought into setting a real challenge. Everybody has sunset photos. We all think they're brilliant. Probably most are pretty good, but come on. It's not difficult to get a good sunset shot. The sky is doing the work for you there. That said, though... I still love a good sunset and I'll shoot them as much as I can.

I jumped in first on one of the challenges in order to be the person who decides what it's going to be. Here was my challenge:

BONES



The moderators removed it, and changed the theme of the challenge.

Seriously.

What the fuck???

So it's not your happy clappy shot. So? It's a fucking skeleton. There's no maggots (though if there were some around I would have shot them, too). To me it's a visually interesting combination of hide, skull and grass. If you wanted to be completely trite about describing it you could say a celebration of the continual cycle of life in nature or something similarly profound.

Close-minded arseholes, I say.

At least I didn't post this one:



The whole thing amuses me more than pisses me off. But it gets me to thinking...

If we approach photography, as well as any other art form, as a means of historical documentation why the hell are we always obsessed with recording the happy bits? Do we seriously want a historical record that says everything was peachy for us? What the hell will the next generation learn from that?

I would much rather see photos of destruction and things that are not readily available to my eyes than pictures of your gappy-toothed grinning sprogs with ice-cream smeared on their faces. A picture of a screaming child is more emotive, and more informative about that child than a posed-up PixiFoto Santa session. Do your kids seriously spend all year grinning hopelessly? I fucking hope not. They'll end up more shallow than Paris Hilton.

When I introduce music composition to students the first thing I discuss with them is intent. If you want to write a piece that inspires your audience to visualise every nightmare they ever had, go for it. If that's your intent. If you want to write a piece that makes people get up and leave the performance in disgust, go ahead. If that's your intent. If you want to write a piece that makes your audience visualise skipping down streets lined with picket fences, bursting blooms of flowers and bright sun, go ahead and do just that. You're most likely to find though, that the pieces that have more depth of emotion have more impact.

So why expect any different in photography? Give me reality any day.

Bones and all.