Competitions

Southampton Water at low tide

After a week of birthday-related disruptions, life now returns to normal. If you can call normal a week in which the son of my local paracetamol pusher unexpectedly became Chancellor of the Exchequer (no fantasy this: until quite recently the Sunak pharmacy used to be situated next door to my dentist [1]). Bobbing about in the wake of an event like a birthday is always a little anticlimactic, but especially so this year, when unpredictable storms with silly names keep rocking up uninvited out of the Atlantic, and wrecking any well-laid weekend plans. Forced to stay indoors and watch the rain (which, if only for those of us aged between 60 and 75, inevitably invokes the melancholic introspection of Dark Side of the Moon – "Hanging on in quiet desperation is the English way..."), the only remedy is to crank up the creative machinery to eleven and see what happens.

One little strategy I've found to work reliably for me is to pretend I'm going to enter whatever competitions have recently been announced. Clearly, the whole idea of photographic and artistic competitions is ridiculous, both in principle and practice, not least when you see the sort of thing that wins the prizes. The very idea of a "best" photograph or painting, selected by a panel of usual-suspect gatekeepers out of thousands of submissions, is a category error of major proportions. The need to grab attention means that competitions are either dog-shows for imitative amateurs where the rules and the leeway within them are well understood, or fashionista catwalks for the MFA crowd, where the idea is to flatter the judges' sense of their own originality, and I'd be amazed if any artist of real standing ever submits work. If they do, it seems they never win. To adapt Noel Coward's remark about television, competitions are for being asked to judge, not entering.

However, few things energise creativity like constraints, and the existence of a stern competition brief with a tight deadline is quite a stimulating discipline (this is beginning to sound as if art is some kind of BDSM practice, but I'm sure you know what I mean). To behave as if you had every intention of entering work into "Housework Photographer of the Year" or "Stains On The Wall 2020" – but to stop short of actually submitting the results – is to get all the creative benefit without reaping any of the inevitable humiliation. You also get to keep the entry fee, of course (and there's always an entry fee). As I mentioned in a recent post, the mere declaration of "hinterland" as the theme for an open exhibition was sufficient for me to kick off a fresh round of picture-making. I didn't submit anything, in the end, even though I consider bona fide "open calls" for exhibitions to be a more worthy undertaking than straightforward prize "competitions". I will definitely be having another shot at the Royal Academy Summer Exhibition this year, for example.

Quite apart from simply getting some new work done, I think the main benefit of these dress rehearsals is the opportunity for some self-knowledge. You end up asking yourself the hard questions in a useful, pragmatic way, rather than staring forlornly at the ceiling at 3 a.m. Instead of "why am I doing this?" you ask "how should I be doing this?". Rather than "am I any good?", the question becomes "is this work any good?". Above all, the concern that perverts all work produced for competitive purposes – "will other people like this?" – becomes "is this the best I can do?". As they say, if you want a better answer, ask a better question.

So, as there's nothing particularly stimulating out there at the moment, I thought it might be interesting to pretend to enter "Landscape Photographer of the Year", which (if the winning entries from previous years are indicative) is pretty much a camera-club dog-show, where "best of breed" is a photograph showing to best advantage the characteristic attributes of a particular, well-established, crowd-pleasing genre of pictorial photography with, ideally, some acceptable novel twist thereupon. Awe-inspiring vista? Check. Balanced composition? Check. Dramatic weather? Check. Blurred water flowing around sharply-defined rocks? Check. Well-deployed foreground JCB? [2] Check. And so on. Given my declared skepticism about landscape photography, and yet my persistence in making photographs in and of the "landscapes" I happen to find myself in, I thought it could be a useful exercise. After all, I do have a mighty portfolio of landscape photographs, virtually none of which have been processed to a completed state. Perhaps there's something worthwhile in there? I do keep promising and postponing a "Welsh Borders" porfolio, for example, and Southampton itself is under-represented in the popular imagination, compared to other cities.

Incidentally, talking of generational divides (oh yes we were, five paragraphs above, pay attention) the current "Corona Virus" thing is an interesting case. For the young folk, "Corona" is a popular brand of Mexican beer. For me, however, it will always be the disgustingly sweet and lurid fizzy pop sold in the shop in the village where my grandparents and cousins lived, and in those days still contained in those wonderful, resealable and recyclable swing-top ceramic-stopper bottles. As the later TV adverts claimed, "every bubble's passed its fizzical"!

Abandoned car in Millbrook, Southampton

1. However, it seems Sunak Jr. attended the prestigious Winchester College, and not our local comp, unlike my children and those of Southampton MP Alan Whitehead. 
2. No, not a mechanical digger, but a "Joe Cornish Boulder". Not my coinage!