A friend recently directed me to a blog post by the photographer Paul Gallagher, with a title something along the lines of Are Our Camera Clubs Promoting the Wrong Thing? link to article here In it, he was rather concerned about the empasis on photographic competitions. His argument was not unreasonable. The deeply competitive atmosphere created by competitions can sometimes inhibit the more collegiate, supportive and friendly aspects of camera club life.
My immediate response, however, was that perhaps it depends on how seriously we take competitions.
Having spent the last year or two judging camera club competitions myself, I sincerely hope that the clubs I have visited do not take my verdicts on their photographs too seriously. After all, what does it actually mean when I give one photograph 18 marks and another 16? It is, at best, a momentary response to an image, filtered through my own tastes, experiences and expectations.
But perhaps this raises a bigger question: have camera club competitions simply had their day?
The enduring value of camera clubs
I think camera clubs are an extremely valuable part of our cultural landscape. Many were established more than 100 years ago; the Leeds Photographic Society, for example, dates back to the nineteenth century. It would be very easy to dismiss camera clubs as old-fashioned, but I think that would be a mistake.
They represent something important: an enduring passion for photography and, perhaps more importantly, a desire to share that passion with other people.
But if we are going to think seriously about the future of camera clubs and their activities, we need to consider how photography itself has changed.
When many of today’s camera clubs were established, photography was an extremely technical business. Cameras were heavy and complicated. Film was relatively expensive. Processing and printing required considerable knowledge and skill, and making a good photograph involved a labour-intensive sequence of processes.
Camera clubs therefore had a very practical purpose. They provided a place where people could learn these difficult skills from one another. Members could share knowledge, solve technical problems and encourage each other in the pursuit of an interest that was genuinely difficult to master.
And this history still seems to influence the way we judge photographs today.
When technical skill was the photograph
When I visit camera clubs to judge competitions, I sometimes get the feeling that we are still placing enormous emphasis on the technical qualities that have been judged for decades: sharpness, exposure, composition, colour balance and so on.
These things certainly matter. But photography has changed enormously.
The technology in a modern camera has taken over many of the technical skills that photographers once had to develop themselves. If we judge a photograph primarily on focus and exposure, it is entirely possible that the photographer has simply allowed the camera to do the work automatically.
The same is increasingly true of editing. Once, darkroom printing involved considerable skill in dodging, burning, exposure and chemical processing. Today, software can make sophisticated adjustments with the click of a button. Artificial intelligence can even identify and correct some of the traditional shortcomings of an image.
The traditional skills have not disappeared, and they are still valuable. But perhaps they have become less significant as a way of judging the photographer.
And this presents us with an interesting opportunity.
What is left for the photographer?
If the camera and the software can do so much of the technical work for us, what is left?
Perhaps what is left is the most important thing of all: the responsibility for deciding what we want to say.
Once we have mastered, or allowed the technology to take care of, exposure, focus and many of the other technical aspects of photography, we are left with much more fundamental questions.
Why this photograph?
Why this subject?
What does it mean?
What am I trying to communicate?
What do I want someone else to feel, think or understand when they see it?
This is what I mean by content.
And I don’t mean content in the rather narrow sense in which the word is sometimes used today. I mean the ideas, emotions, experiences and feelings embodied in a photograph.
Perhaps we could think of a photograph as a container. A beautifully designed box of chocolates may be attractive, but ultimately what interests us is what is inside the box.
Photography can be the same.
We don’t simply want to look at a photograph and think, That’s nicely composed. It’s sharp. The exposure is good and it’s beautifully presented.
We want to come away feeling that the photograph has revealed something. Perhaps it has told us something about the photographer. Perhaps it has made us see something familiar in a completely different way. Perhaps it has changed what we think, feel or believe.
The photograph has to contain something worth discovering.
The problem with judging photographs
This is where I sometimes find myself conflicted when judging competitions.
There can be a tension between the technical qualities of a photograph and what the photograph is actually saying.
It has made me wonder whether there is really such a thing as a bad photograph.
A photograph that is technically imperfect can sometimes have a profound impact if its content is strong. A chaotic, blurred or unconventional photograph might tell me far more about the photographer and their experience than a technically immaculate image.
Sometimes a highly polished photograph can actually conceal something rather than reveal it.
This is why I am increasingly uncomfortable with the language of good and bad photographs. It encourages us to think of photography as a competition in which there is a correct answer and a hierarchy of achievement.
Perhaps there isn’t.
Perhaps a more interesting question is simply: what does this photograph give me?
Beyond the traditional categories
I also wonder whether we should start questioning the traditional categories through which we organise photography: landscape, portrait, street, wildlife, monochrome and so on.
These categories are useful for organising competitions and exhibitions, but they also carry cultural assumptions about what a photograph is supposed to be.
I think this can become creatively restrictive.
I describe myself as a landscape photographer, but I am increasingly uncomfortable with the limitations of the term. Many of my landscape photographs include people and buildings. I think of many of them as photographs about nature, but human beings are part of nature too. Why should a photograph containing a person suddenly cease to be a landscape photograph?
Perhaps these boundaries have had their day too.
Rather than beginning with a photographic category, perhaps we should begin with an idea, an experience, a question or a feeling.
What might a different kind of camera club look like?
So what would happen if a camera club deliberately stepped outside this traditional model?
Perhaps, for example, a club could have a year without competitions.
Not a year without photography. Quite the opposite.
A year devoted to sharing photographs, talking about them and, most importantly, talking about the stories behind them.
Instead of asking members to submit a landscape, a portrait or a monochrome, perhaps a club could set challenges around ideas: belonging, loss, memory, work, community, isolation, joy, change, nature or home.
The emphasis would shift from What kind of photograph is this? to What is this photograph about?
Imagine, for example, setting a project around a passion for churches rather than asking members to produce architectural photographs of churches.
The starting point could be much broader.
Who is the church for?
What happens inside it?
What role does it play in the community?
What does it mean to the people who use it?
Churches carry enormous emotional associations. They are places where people are baptised, married and buried. They can represent faith, community, history, belonging, conflict or loss.
There is an extraordinary amount of photographic content there.
Of course, you could turn up at a church with a tilt-shift lens and a tripod and produce a technically perfect photograph with impeccable verticals.
But that might only be the beginning.
The more interesting challenge would be to discover what the church actually means.
A different future for camera clubs
Perhaps this is where I part company with the more disparaging views of camera clubs.
I don’t think camera clubs are the problem. I think they are potentially part of the solution.
They are communities of people who already have something in common: a passion for photography. They have buildings, meeting places, friendships, experience and generations of accumulated knowledge.
What they perhaps need is not to disappear, but to evolve.
Rather than continuing to measure photography primarily through technical achievement and competition, camera clubs could become places where people explore what photography can actually do.
Photography can connect people. It can tell stories. It can explore difficult subjects. It can help us understand our communities and our environment. It can communicate experiences that are difficult to put into words. It can make us look again at places and people we think we already know.
That seems to me to be a much more exciting future.
So perhaps the question isn’t whether camera clubs have had their day.
Perhaps the question is whether the traditional idea of what a camera club is has had its day.
If we can move the emphasis away from winning competitions and towards curiosity, conversation, meaning and connection, camera clubs could become more relevant than ever.
The technology has changed.
Perhaps now it is time for our idea of photography to change with it.
MARK WADDINGTON 
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