The winnable competition

The winnable competition

One of the things that differentiates photographers is what makes them tick. Some shoot for art, some to record beautiful, memorable or important things. Others are in it to win it…

I don’t like compiling lists of the ten best pop songs EVER. I’d rather have a list of thirty that I like a lot. Similarly, it seems perverse to run a competition in which the first place wins £1,000, and nobody else gets anything. There are a lot of competitions like this, and adding insult to injury, you have to pay to enter many of them – the competition is actually a moneymaking concern for the ‘sponsor’ (or will be if enough people enter enough pictures).

But that’s how they usually work these days. I want to offer a suggestion to competition organisers – try a wider, more equal spread of goodies.

Many years ago, I won a place in a book. The competition was for images taken in mid-Wales during a specific month of a particular year, and as I was on holiday there for a week, I entered. It was called the John Claridge Monochrome Challenge (I like black and white), and there were two top prizes, for the single best image, and the best print. They were engraved slates. But all 50 selected images were printed in a book, given to all who won a place, along with a book of Claridge images.



Best of all, the prizes were distributed at an Ilford place near Oxford Street, with John Claridge in attendance. (If you don’t know who he is, look him up, and have a look at the work on his website!)

That was a singularly ‘winnable’ competition. It didn’t one big prize, and it encouraged a lot of us whose work appeared in the book. Similarly, around 1990, JCB sponsored a competition called ‘The Spirit of Staffordshire’ for three years – pictures taken in Staffordshire or with a strong Staffordshire connection were eligible. Attractive for a Staffordshire lad like me, living just over the border in the West Midlands.
Possibly the best competition of all was more of a learning experience. Run by Roger Maile as part of his Creative Monochrome publishing venture, it ran for twelve years as an annual publication, Best of Friends. I entered several times, and got a couple of images published towards the end. A proud achievement to rub shoulders with people like Tim Rudman and Tudr Tudr, whose environmental nudes set a benchmark that I still aspire to.

So – what do you like? Are you competitive, ready to wade to victory through the broken camera and bodies of the rest of us to a new Nikon, or would you rather join in with a big cooperative venture?