Disappointment

[connealy]

This is more of a warning and a rant than a critique.

I stopped in at Barnes & Noble today and was pleased to find the B&W Annual 2005, a collection of over two hundred images selected as submissions to a contest by Black and White Magazine (the U.S. publication, not the Brit one of the same name).  Paid the $12.95 price and strolled over to the B&N coffee shop where I ordered up a grilled chicken sandwich and then sat down to peruse my purchase.  I was astounded at how ordinary the pictures were.  It was like a random selection from a month's worth of the APUG gallery -- technically competent, but mostly unoriginal and derivative.  

Of course, there are a few good pictures scattered through the publication, and I might have had a somewhat better impression if the editors hadn't managed to pack so many poor pictures into the opening "Animals" category.  Most of those photos depicted the animals as imprisoned abuse victims, and few showed any kind of genuine connection between the animals and the photographer.  Moving on, the nudes were insipid, the pictures of clothed people were little better than snapshots, and some of the people were depicted in ways that seemed cruel and mocking.  The "Patterns and Textures" category showed some good work, but most of the rest made me wish I had spent the same money on getting the current month's Lens Work which has the cowboy tintype article.

I'm at a loss to explain how the publisher and editors could miss the mark so widely.  I don't always like the photos that are displayed in the semi-monthly magazine, but I do always learn something from them.  Perhaps presenting a selection of pictures from each photographer along with some critical notes is just a much better format.  I suppose there is also the possibility that a lot of people will actually like the pictures which I dislike; maybe I'm more radically out of step with the rest of the world than I had realized. I'll appreciate feedback from anyone else who has a chance to browse through the Annual.  Right now, I'm kind of feeling like I may need a long vacation on another planet.

[nelsonfoto]

B&W... didnt they used to be much more selective? I recall reading something somewhere... where was that....

[Alan Gage]

I'm not at all familiar with the publication, so take this with a grain of salt.

Both shooters of B&W and classic cameras are a bit in the minority right now, and many seem to like that. I know I feel that way at times. Using a 50 year old camera loaded with B&W film when surrounded by a bunch of digital point and shoots. You know everyone thinks you're a bit odd but you smile to yourself on the inside, because you know something they don't.

Sometimes it seems like when a group of people like that get together they think anything done in their medium is superior, just because it's in their medium.  I've seen quite a few pictures posted in the classic cameras forum that were pretty bad (IMO anyway), yet people highly praise them anyway. I get the feeling this happens just because they were taken with a classic camera and it's tainted how people look at the pictures.

Maybe the same thing has happened with the magazine. If it's B&W then it automatically has it's status raised, no matter what the content.

Alan

BTW, I hope no one thinks I'm being too high and mighty about this, I know my pictures suck for the most part...no matter what I took them with.

[connealy]

It's a mystery to me.  The magazine was so popular with aspiring photographers that submissions were refused for two years because of the backlog.  There were hundreds of entrants in the competion; it is hard to believe that there would not be a lot of good photos to choose from.  On top of that, the captions assigned to the photos were even worse.  There was one rather arty picture of a half-naked woman stretched across a bed that was entitled "Epilepsy".  Hard for me to imagine anything more inappropriate.  Who knows?  Maybe it will become a milestone and a collectors' item.