Clichés

[Mike Farley]

A legacy of my former membership of Edinburgh Photographic Society is that they continue to keep me updated with their news. A while back, the society was chosen to represent the Scottish Federation in the PAGB run national inter-club championships and set off with a collection of prints. The club has a large number of talented photographers and I have no doubt that the selected images were of a high standard, as they needed to finish in the top two of the Scottish championship to qualify. In the event, they did not make it through the first round as the judges preferred images of the more heavily manipulated variety.

The RPS has addressed the issue by splitting its former Visual Art category for distinctions into Creative and Pictorial, but as the PAGB does not attempt to distinguish between different types of photography it does not currently have this option. I wonder, for example, how a set of contemporary images would fare in a PAGB appraisal at any level unless there were assessors sufficiently knowledgeable to evaluate this style of work? This is a particular issue when images are typically only viewed for a few seconds before being marked, meaning that initial visual impact is everything whereas some shots are more subtle and can require longer to appreciate their qualities. By comparison, adjudication events for RPS distinctions are much more considered affairs.

While it is encouraging that the example shots in the PAGB newsletter apparently show balance, it is more worrying that at the workshop attendees were shown more of the creative type. It would be certainly be useful to how many people were successful with pictorial images compared to those who submitted creative ones. As the Edinburgh experience shows, this might be an issue which the PAGB has yet fully to resolve.