What I loved about your post, and the exercise and pleasure of reading it, was the honesty and transparency of engaging the question from different points of view. The photographer or artist must always engage their own questions in the process of making. Thinking, while critically important, is not as important as how each author, artist, or photographer moves towards their personal finish or result.
I would not think Jerry Ulesman considered his work unprocessed. With five enlargers and pin-registered processing of the combination of objects, landscape, and the meticulous arrangement of everything, Jerry always had a sense of humor as well.
I am all about the questions. For me, it's the deep, honest integrity of the specificity of the inquiry. Ask the right question, and respectfully listen to a response, and the discussion will be transparent. Institutions must show the courage of their convictions. All those different institutions are interrogating image-making from different points on the same compass.
At the school I used to work at, a respected colleague and I were asked to write a new policy about plagiarism in contemporary practices. We looked at a moving needle in the explosion of media and digital processing and a blending of criticisms across new works and traditional practices.
We decided to try to author a new approach to the old problem and define a core of honesty and transparency in practices. After weeks of discussion, research, and word-smithing, we came up with a pretty good inquiry into the problems and some ways to interrogate character, meaning and include new media opportunities and responsibilities.
Our work was rejected by the college as not being direct enough, and in the end, they just plagiarized another institution's document.
Thanks for making my Friday morning more interesting than I thought it was going to be...
Thanks so much for this thoughtful reply, Dennis — it's nice to hear from you. We'd love more folks to see this link. Please share it in your photo networks. Take care!
This is a very helpful post. Rather than arguing about what a photograph is, the issue is the contextual answers we provide to the question, "what do we mean by 'real'"? And let's face it: it's easier to be dogmatic about the definition of a photograph than it is to be clear about how we define reality. The first can be quite categorical; the second requires work and leads us into challenging discussions about unspoken presuppositions that we'd often rather ignore.
Photographers sometimes reach breathtaking conclusions about what they do and make. Other people spend their lives qualifying or disqualifying photographs in numerous ways. Right and wrong are seldom relevant. It's like putting poetry to some kind of grammatical test. A history of photography is actually more of a history of writing about photography. Images and writing are somewhat interdependent, but images, when they are made, do not require or come with a certificate of historical, social, tecnological or cultural approval.
I find myself a bit on the other side of this. Not to make it sound easy, but to me “photograph” is simpler to define and come to a practical and useful understanding of than “real” which…photographers aren’t the first to struggle with the concept.
Not to say it is simple, only simpler. The implications are huge though and go far outside of this sphere.
Thanks, Andy, for the thought-provoking post, and to Ziad Mnif for writing his piece. As I was reading, my first thoughts went to the birth of Impressionism, the competing shows, and the arguments of what constitutes painting as art. Then, of course, the “Examining Pictures” mentions impressionists and cubists. I thought of Jerry Uelsmann, of course, and couldn’t remember how to spell his name, but Dennis and Derrick bailed me out.
The world of contests and judging is beyond my experience, and after reading this piece, I am glad and will most likely keep it that way. The desire for external approval of one’s art and creativity cannot seem to be denied, I suppose, but it does add more baggage to what, for many, is a difficult process at best. How many wonderful, truly artistic works are out in the world, unknown because they have never been submitted? Does it matter?
As for all the public trials at the speed of the post-quote, more reason to stay away from the crowds, just a small circle of friends.
Thanks for an informative piece. As a long time photographer who started in the darkroom at age 9, I cannot understand why on earth HDR files would not qualify. As an analogy, if a film was invented with a 20 stop dynamic range it would certainly be acceptable. HDR is the same functionally. It doesn’t add anything to the scene, it just holds more detail and is closer to the human eye in the way it processes dynamic range. I am all for authentic photography but sometimes the new rules simply don’t make sense.
Ohh the comments are as illuminating as the article.
Photography by its very nature is subjective. Competitions by their nature are implied objectively. They can’t be when we are judging something subjective…
All we can do is try and try and try to put down objective measurements. The edges of what’s reasonable moves as the edges shift.
There objectively can’t ever be the best photo.
I struggle with competitions. Particularly once there is a panel of judges.
This is a very helpful clarification of a problem that often gets flattened into panic.
What I appreciate most is the distinction between different meanings of “photograph.” The public argument usually treats “real” as if everyone means the same thing by it, but competitions clearly do not. A photojournalism contest, a wildlife competition, an art prize, and an AI category are not protecting the same value. One is protecting evidence. One is protecting encounter. One is protecting authorship. One is judging image-making by a different set of tools.
That makes the current moment less about whether photography is dead and more about whether institutions can say clearly what kind of photography they are rewarding. The danger for photographers is not only AI. It is ambiguity. If the rules are vague, the public will supply its own verdict, and often at social media speed.
The most useful advice here is also the least glamorous: keep the RAW file, keep the layered file, read the rules every time, and understand the room you are entering. That feels like the new professional discipline. Not because it solves the debate, but because it protects the photographer from being caught between competing definitions of truth.
This is a strong reminder that photography has never been one thing. But now, the differences have consequences.
Great discussion. I have been accused of twice, by co-workers in the industry, of my work being AI. Which it was not, not even a pixel. As much as I agree we should not pass off work as our own if it is AI, we should take a measured approach before we judge a work as being AI.
Thanks for bringing a pertinent and important topic to the forefront. I have only entered one photo contest and that was in 1973 at a high school yearbook/newspaper workshop. My image was taken at night, a man sitting on a park bench with a street light overhead. I intentionally under exposed and "push processed" the film for a very grainy image to reflect a mood and some emotion.
The image didn't win, place or show in spite of the fact my peers in the workshop thought it was bold, creative and highly impactful. The image that won was a photograph of a young woman in a hammock with her dog. Textbook perfect, square peg in a square hole, cute & adorable - but only appealing for the first few minutes it was viewed. After that, it was just another image like all the rest.
Naturally I was disappointed and when I asked the judges for feedback the only response I got was "...too grainy." Never mind that was my intention, my method of evoking emotion. I was reminded of what W.C. Fields said: "Never work with children or animals." But I knew there was more to be learned from the experience.
I finally landed on the notion that art cannot be judged. Objective quantifiable "points" cannot be assigned to an entirely subjective field of endeavor. The advent of AI has a faint parallel to allowing transgender women to compete in women's athletics. The idea is a stretch, but when you think about it....?
I've never entered nor will I ever enter another photo competition. I will also never enter any women's sports competitions.
This analysis offers a perspective that had previously alluded my understanding. It is meaningful to anyone concerned with competitive photography as described. And to those of us who shoot for clients. I provide a range of output types to my patrons - ranging from archival, documentary images to advertising images and surreal and abstract art forms. Some clients need reassurance about how images are generated. Some seek to control how their images are created. This article will help me in these conversations. Thank you.
Interesting breakdown of categories, but at least in the world I see (which is likely flawed as anything else) these competitions aren’t really the arbiters of much these days. So I’m not sure how much weight we should give them and their rules. Even World Press - likely the most recognizable and impactful on the list - I would say carries a significant cultural weight to only a small sample of the photo world.
Exceptions pop up now and again but when I think of the most impactful and lasting works from the last few decades they mostly are represented in galleries and in monographs - mediums in which they tend to be contextualized more transparently or according to the photographer’s real intent - and are not even the kinds of pictures that win these things.
What is more interesting to me is how the definition of a photograph stands in relation to AI imagery and where that very significant discussion is happening the most vigorously. It’s the right question for sure - I wonder where besides contests is it being seriously scrutinized.
The four-room taxonomy you've constructed here is, without question, the most direct institutional representation of this argument I've seen.The four-room taxonomy you've constructed here is, without question, the most direct institutional representation of this argument I've seen. All of the ambiguity surrounding degrees of strictness is eliminated, and instead we can focus on the fact that these represent four different responses to a previous question. Describing them as four different responses to a single question, rather than four degrees of strictness, actually does more justice to the argument, because that question has existed and continues to exist in the practitioner tradition well before anyone has written, or dare I say ever will write, contest rules about it.
Neither Fan Ho nor Uelsmann would pass the World Press Photo verification process. Both represent the spirit of photography we are trying to capture here. The practitioner case for why goes back further than most contest rule writers have looked: The Negative Was Never the Photograph (https://dbucknerphotography.substack.com/p/the-fine-print-and-what-it-cost-me).
What your taxonomy helps identify, and I believe best explains the pile-ons, is a contract issue. A photograph presenting itself as a witness statement carries a different understanding with its viewer than one presenting itself as a pictorial construction. The record and witness rooms are there to accommodate that understanding. The pile-ons are the result of a group of people attempting to enforce a single understanding on an image that presents itself as something else, and that is the best part about it, with absolutely no common terminology or negotiation to indicate which understanding should be enforced.
You conveniently leave out the deception question, and it is the hardest question of all. The photographer who removes a power line from a photo and submits it as documentary is doing something categorically different from Fan Ho, not because of the manipulation, but because of what that photo claims to be. Fan Ho was honest. The pile-on target may not have been. That distinction is where the contract between image and viewer either holds or breaks: The Contract Nobody Read (https://dbucknerphotography.substack.com/p/the-negative-was-never-the-photograph?r=2jp7zg).
Your four rooms are attempting to make that distinction apply, but the problem is that the people making that distinction in a quote-post thread are not working from any room. They are working from an assumption.
Your piece shows that the rooms exist. The history of practice shows that they were necessary. What no one has built is the referee.
The simple photo, is a hard copy of a memory. When you see a thing it enters as light and feeling and the start of a story, then you lift the camera and make a hard copy that holds the facts but not the heartbeat and later when you remember the picture you are not recalling the image you are recalling the moment around it the air the meaning the reason you raised your hand and froze time, that is the difference the picture keeps what was there and you keep what it meant.
As an artist, I don't want artists being told what to do. But if I'm interested in apple constests, I'm uninterested in people submitting oranges, or orange/apple hybrids. But I want there to be conests for people who want to submit oranges, or orange/apple hybrids. We just need to be clear what that contest is about, and honest about what we want to submit. That is what I like about this article. It's about that honesty. As an artist, I loathe tools (and the corporations that make them) that have stolen the work of artists, and artists to use those tools appalls me. The use of tools made with stolen art should be banned from any respectable art contest, and any artist using the stolen work of others should be banned as well.
Andy’s text reads like he wrote it. The subsequent content reads more like AI or at least AI-edited content. But perhaps that is just the style these days, influenced by so much such content that I t’s infecting even real writers’ prose.
A conscientious photographer will always focus on the truth. So we can indeed get away with saying that the camera never lies; only photographers do.
As for the question—How does a photograph differ from reality?—I believe it is meaningless. A photograph is a physical thing. It is real.
If we delve into the metaphysical, we can also say that a photograph transcends language. For instance, the dictionary assures us that a mirage is real; its existence as an objective reality.Its meaning is well defined. But if even an illusion is a thing, can you measure the depth of the water it pretends to be?
To be sure, when I say that a photograph is a physical thing, I mean a print. If you boil that statement down further, it means that an image on a screen, or the reproduction of a photograph in a book, or on a poster, is not a photograph but its facsimile.
Remember Ansel Adams’s famous line about the print being the performance of the negative, as the symphony is the perfornance of a score (a music manuscript). Well, not even a negative is the finshed work, so not a latent image of any kind, digital or analog. The photograph per se is the print. To say otherwise, that the negative is a photograph—beyond the fact that it is a part of the process of creating one—is to say that merely looking at the score of a Mahler symphony is to hear it.
I don’t see any of the other comments referring to the fact that it was Zied Mnif (winphoto.io) who actually wrote the article about contest rules and how differently some understand and appreciate the the idea that, if an image results from a prompt—regardless of whether we call it a photograph or something else—it is nonetheless a legitimate work (of whatever medium you care to call it. Simply pick which taxonomical box you want to put it in.
What I loved about your post, and the exercise and pleasure of reading it, was the honesty and transparency of engaging the question from different points of view. The photographer or artist must always engage their own questions in the process of making. Thinking, while critically important, is not as important as how each author, artist, or photographer moves towards their personal finish or result.
I would not think Jerry Ulesman considered his work unprocessed. With five enlargers and pin-registered processing of the combination of objects, landscape, and the meticulous arrangement of everything, Jerry always had a sense of humor as well.
I am all about the questions. For me, it's the deep, honest integrity of the specificity of the inquiry. Ask the right question, and respectfully listen to a response, and the discussion will be transparent. Institutions must show the courage of their convictions. All those different institutions are interrogating image-making from different points on the same compass.
At the school I used to work at, a respected colleague and I were asked to write a new policy about plagiarism in contemporary practices. We looked at a moving needle in the explosion of media and digital processing and a blending of criticisms across new works and traditional practices.
We decided to try to author a new approach to the old problem and define a core of honesty and transparency in practices. After weeks of discussion, research, and word-smithing, we came up with a pretty good inquiry into the problems and some ways to interrogate character, meaning and include new media opportunities and responsibilities.
Our work was rejected by the college as not being direct enough, and in the end, they just plagiarized another institution's document.
Thanks for making my Friday morning more interesting than I thought it was going to be...
Thanks so much for this thoughtful reply, Dennis — it's nice to hear from you. We'd love more folks to see this link. Please share it in your photo networks. Take care!
https://www.flakphoto.news/p/how-does-a-photograph-differ-from
This is a very helpful post. Rather than arguing about what a photograph is, the issue is the contextual answers we provide to the question, "what do we mean by 'real'"? And let's face it: it's easier to be dogmatic about the definition of a photograph than it is to be clear about how we define reality. The first can be quite categorical; the second requires work and leads us into challenging discussions about unspoken presuppositions that we'd often rather ignore.
Well said, Alan. Thank you for reading!
Photographers sometimes reach breathtaking conclusions about what they do and make. Other people spend their lives qualifying or disqualifying photographs in numerous ways. Right and wrong are seldom relevant. It's like putting poetry to some kind of grammatical test. A history of photography is actually more of a history of writing about photography. Images and writing are somewhat interdependent, but images, when they are made, do not require or come with a certificate of historical, social, tecnological or cultural approval.
I find myself a bit on the other side of this. Not to make it sound easy, but to me “photograph” is simpler to define and come to a practical and useful understanding of than “real” which…photographers aren’t the first to struggle with the concept.
Not to say it is simple, only simpler. The implications are huge though and go far outside of this sphere.
Thanks, Andy, for the thought-provoking post, and to Ziad Mnif for writing his piece. As I was reading, my first thoughts went to the birth of Impressionism, the competing shows, and the arguments of what constitutes painting as art. Then, of course, the “Examining Pictures” mentions impressionists and cubists. I thought of Jerry Uelsmann, of course, and couldn’t remember how to spell his name, but Dennis and Derrick bailed me out.
The world of contests and judging is beyond my experience, and after reading this piece, I am glad and will most likely keep it that way. The desire for external approval of one’s art and creativity cannot seem to be denied, I suppose, but it does add more baggage to what, for many, is a difficult process at best. How many wonderful, truly artistic works are out in the world, unknown because they have never been submitted? Does it matter?
As for all the public trials at the speed of the post-quote, more reason to stay away from the crowds, just a small circle of friends.
Thanks for an informative piece. As a long time photographer who started in the darkroom at age 9, I cannot understand why on earth HDR files would not qualify. As an analogy, if a film was invented with a 20 stop dynamic range it would certainly be acceptable. HDR is the same functionally. It doesn’t add anything to the scene, it just holds more detail and is closer to the human eye in the way it processes dynamic range. I am all for authentic photography but sometimes the new rules simply don’t make sense.
Very clarifying. Thank you. Explaining these guidelines is an excellent way to provide insights into the broader discussions taking place today.
Thanks for reading, James. Please share with your photo friends! Here's a link: https://www.flakphoto.news/p/how-does-a-photograph-differ-from
Ohh the comments are as illuminating as the article.
Photography by its very nature is subjective. Competitions by their nature are implied objectively. They can’t be when we are judging something subjective…
All we can do is try and try and try to put down objective measurements. The edges of what’s reasonable moves as the edges shift.
There objectively can’t ever be the best photo.
I struggle with competitions. Particularly once there is a panel of judges.
This is a very helpful clarification of a problem that often gets flattened into panic.
What I appreciate most is the distinction between different meanings of “photograph.” The public argument usually treats “real” as if everyone means the same thing by it, but competitions clearly do not. A photojournalism contest, a wildlife competition, an art prize, and an AI category are not protecting the same value. One is protecting evidence. One is protecting encounter. One is protecting authorship. One is judging image-making by a different set of tools.
That makes the current moment less about whether photography is dead and more about whether institutions can say clearly what kind of photography they are rewarding. The danger for photographers is not only AI. It is ambiguity. If the rules are vague, the public will supply its own verdict, and often at social media speed.
The most useful advice here is also the least glamorous: keep the RAW file, keep the layered file, read the rules every time, and understand the room you are entering. That feels like the new professional discipline. Not because it solves the debate, but because it protects the photographer from being caught between competing definitions of truth.
This is a strong reminder that photography has never been one thing. But now, the differences have consequences.
Great discussion. I have been accused of twice, by co-workers in the industry, of my work being AI. Which it was not, not even a pixel. As much as I agree we should not pass off work as our own if it is AI, we should take a measured approach before we judge a work as being AI.
Thanks for bringing a pertinent and important topic to the forefront. I have only entered one photo contest and that was in 1973 at a high school yearbook/newspaper workshop. My image was taken at night, a man sitting on a park bench with a street light overhead. I intentionally under exposed and "push processed" the film for a very grainy image to reflect a mood and some emotion.
The image didn't win, place or show in spite of the fact my peers in the workshop thought it was bold, creative and highly impactful. The image that won was a photograph of a young woman in a hammock with her dog. Textbook perfect, square peg in a square hole, cute & adorable - but only appealing for the first few minutes it was viewed. After that, it was just another image like all the rest.
Naturally I was disappointed and when I asked the judges for feedback the only response I got was "...too grainy." Never mind that was my intention, my method of evoking emotion. I was reminded of what W.C. Fields said: "Never work with children or animals." But I knew there was more to be learned from the experience.
I finally landed on the notion that art cannot be judged. Objective quantifiable "points" cannot be assigned to an entirely subjective field of endeavor. The advent of AI has a faint parallel to allowing transgender women to compete in women's athletics. The idea is a stretch, but when you think about it....?
I've never entered nor will I ever enter another photo competition. I will also never enter any women's sports competitions.
This analysis offers a perspective that had previously alluded my understanding. It is meaningful to anyone concerned with competitive photography as described. And to those of us who shoot for clients. I provide a range of output types to my patrons - ranging from archival, documentary images to advertising images and surreal and abstract art forms. Some clients need reassurance about how images are generated. Some seek to control how their images are created. This article will help me in these conversations. Thank you.
Interesting breakdown of categories, but at least in the world I see (which is likely flawed as anything else) these competitions aren’t really the arbiters of much these days. So I’m not sure how much weight we should give them and their rules. Even World Press - likely the most recognizable and impactful on the list - I would say carries a significant cultural weight to only a small sample of the photo world.
Exceptions pop up now and again but when I think of the most impactful and lasting works from the last few decades they mostly are represented in galleries and in monographs - mediums in which they tend to be contextualized more transparently or according to the photographer’s real intent - and are not even the kinds of pictures that win these things.
What is more interesting to me is how the definition of a photograph stands in relation to AI imagery and where that very significant discussion is happening the most vigorously. It’s the right question for sure - I wonder where besides contests is it being seriously scrutinized.
I agree, photo v. AI is a fascinating discussion. I hope to publish more on this subject here soon. Thanks for reading, Peter!
The four-room taxonomy you've constructed here is, without question, the most direct institutional representation of this argument I've seen.The four-room taxonomy you've constructed here is, without question, the most direct institutional representation of this argument I've seen. All of the ambiguity surrounding degrees of strictness is eliminated, and instead we can focus on the fact that these represent four different responses to a previous question. Describing them as four different responses to a single question, rather than four degrees of strictness, actually does more justice to the argument, because that question has existed and continues to exist in the practitioner tradition well before anyone has written, or dare I say ever will write, contest rules about it.
Neither Fan Ho nor Uelsmann would pass the World Press Photo verification process. Both represent the spirit of photography we are trying to capture here. The practitioner case for why goes back further than most contest rule writers have looked: The Negative Was Never the Photograph (https://dbucknerphotography.substack.com/p/the-fine-print-and-what-it-cost-me).
What your taxonomy helps identify, and I believe best explains the pile-ons, is a contract issue. A photograph presenting itself as a witness statement carries a different understanding with its viewer than one presenting itself as a pictorial construction. The record and witness rooms are there to accommodate that understanding. The pile-ons are the result of a group of people attempting to enforce a single understanding on an image that presents itself as something else, and that is the best part about it, with absolutely no common terminology or negotiation to indicate which understanding should be enforced.
You conveniently leave out the deception question, and it is the hardest question of all. The photographer who removes a power line from a photo and submits it as documentary is doing something categorically different from Fan Ho, not because of the manipulation, but because of what that photo claims to be. Fan Ho was honest. The pile-on target may not have been. That distinction is where the contract between image and viewer either holds or breaks: The Contract Nobody Read (https://dbucknerphotography.substack.com/p/the-negative-was-never-the-photograph?r=2jp7zg).
Your four rooms are attempting to make that distinction apply, but the problem is that the people making that distinction in a quote-post thread are not working from any room. They are working from an assumption.
Your piece shows that the rooms exist. The history of practice shows that they were necessary. What no one has built is the referee.
The simple photo, is a hard copy of a memory. When you see a thing it enters as light and feeling and the start of a story, then you lift the camera and make a hard copy that holds the facts but not the heartbeat and later when you remember the picture you are not recalling the image you are recalling the moment around it the air the meaning the reason you raised your hand and froze time, that is the difference the picture keeps what was there and you keep what it meant.
As an artist, I don't want artists being told what to do. But if I'm interested in apple constests, I'm uninterested in people submitting oranges, or orange/apple hybrids. But I want there to be conests for people who want to submit oranges, or orange/apple hybrids. We just need to be clear what that contest is about, and honest about what we want to submit. That is what I like about this article. It's about that honesty. As an artist, I loathe tools (and the corporations that make them) that have stolen the work of artists, and artists to use those tools appalls me. The use of tools made with stolen art should be banned from any respectable art contest, and any artist using the stolen work of others should be banned as well.
Andy’s text reads like he wrote it. The subsequent content reads more like AI or at least AI-edited content. But perhaps that is just the style these days, influenced by so much such content that I t’s infecting even real writers’ prose.
A PHOTOGRAPH IS ITS OWN REALITY
A conscientious photographer will always focus on the truth. So we can indeed get away with saying that the camera never lies; only photographers do.
As for the question—How does a photograph differ from reality?—I believe it is meaningless. A photograph is a physical thing. It is real.
If we delve into the metaphysical, we can also say that a photograph transcends language. For instance, the dictionary assures us that a mirage is real; its existence as an objective reality.Its meaning is well defined. But if even an illusion is a thing, can you measure the depth of the water it pretends to be?
To be sure, when I say that a photograph is a physical thing, I mean a print. If you boil that statement down further, it means that an image on a screen, or the reproduction of a photograph in a book, or on a poster, is not a photograph but its facsimile.
Remember Ansel Adams’s famous line about the print being the performance of the negative, as the symphony is the perfornance of a score (a music manuscript). Well, not even a negative is the finshed work, so not a latent image of any kind, digital or analog. The photograph per se is the print. To say otherwise, that the negative is a photograph—beyond the fact that it is a part of the process of creating one—is to say that merely looking at the score of a Mahler symphony is to hear it.
I don’t see any of the other comments referring to the fact that it was Zied Mnif (winphoto.io) who actually wrote the article about contest rules and how differently some understand and appreciate the the idea that, if an image results from a prompt—regardless of whether we call it a photograph or something else—it is nonetheless a legitimate work (of whatever medium you care to call it. Simply pick which taxonomical box you want to put it in.