The Worst Clichés

So I've got a question for you. What would you say are the worst subject-matter clichés in photography? I'm trying to come up with a list.

I'll start [my openers were the first three —Ed.]:

1. Sunsets
2. Flowers
3. Cats
4. Homeless people [Martin]
5. Selfies [Jim Simmons]
6. A pier and a lake [Rodolfo Canet]
7. Streaky headlights from long exposures [Andrew]
8. "The meal I am about to eat" [John Hagen]
9. Waterfalls [Mattias]
10. Long exposures of moving water, whether they be waves, rivers or waterfalls [Jeremy T]
11. Rainbows [Carl Siracusa]
12. The whole country of Iceland [Chris Y.]
13. Slot canyons [Yr. Hmbl. Ed. again]
14. Windmills [David B]
15. Geometric architectural element [Nicholas Condon]
16. Old barns [Dave Jenkins, who sold 29,000 copies of his book of pictures of old barns!]
17. "Witty" juxtapositions of posters/billboards and unsuspecting passers-by [Richard Tugwell]
18. Reflections [David Dyer-Bennet]
19. Reflections in mirrored sunglasses [Richard Tugwell]
20. Dogs [Jim Wright] [Actually Jim, there are no cliché dog pictures. They are all unique, full of personality, distinctive, and charmingly appealing! Well.... —Ed.]
21. Lighthouses [Richard Nugent]
22. Rowboats, kayaks or canoes tied up together or in a row [me again]
23. Ruins [kalli]
24. Nude women in high heels and low earrings [Eric Kellerman] [Helmut Newton called that a career —Ed.]
25. Random snapshots of random passersby on city streets [ronin]
26. Old peoples' hands [Dave Morris]
27. Shots looking up or down long, winding staircases that form a spiral [Jimmy Renfro]
28. Old skeletal cars or tractors in fields [Jimmy Renfro]
29. Abandoned old boats high and dry on beaches [Jimmy Renfro]
30. Peeling paint and shredded billboards [Peter Nilsson]
31. Abandoned urban interiors [Martin]
32. Lone trees on hills [Ruby]
33. Pictures of self and camera in (bathroom) mirror [Frank]
34. Photos made from a canoe with the bow of the canoe projecting into the bottom of the picture [James Bullard]
35. Half-filled wine glasses in front of some out-of-focus scenery [Judith Wallerius]
36. Classic cars and airplanes [Mikey]

Can you name others?

Be the first
Clichés are interesting to me. To begin with, they change with time and circumstance. Sometimes old ones can embody fashions that, in retrospect, seem bizarre.

The easiest way to make a good photograph of a cliché is to be the first person to think of it.

Of course cliché photos can always be good, too. And that's an interesting thing about them. Here's an example: a million tourists have made joke pictures of a friend holding the Washington Monument in his hand or pushing back against the Leaning Tower of Pisa, by conflating the foreground and background as if near and distant objects were the same distance from the camera. Old; been done; cliché. Yet here is an inventive use of that very trick that is a fine and interesting photograph and nothing I've ever seen before. (Or maybe I just like bokeh. I dislike the photographer's title, though, which smacks you with the fish of the obvious.)

Know that territory
I do think that the more clichéd the subject, the more obligation we have to be familiar with prior photos of the subject...the better to more intelligently place our own photos in the context of the cliché. Whether ironically or non-ironically. (I'm thinking of that famous picture of numerous tourists all posing by the Tower of Pisa in a variety of "hold up the tower" poses, but I can't find it. I thought it was by Burk Uzzle, but I guess not. [It was Martin Parr, 1990. Thanks to Andrew. —Ed.])

If you can stand a little crudity (might not be work / school safe, so watch it), here's an example of a photo by someone who knows the cliché and is playing off it. It's not a good photo either, but it's funnier.

I digress
But I'm getting away from the question. Back to your nominations for the list....

Mike

This discussion continues here.

Original contents copyright 2015 by Michael C. Johnston and/or the bylined author. All Rights Reserved. Links in this post may be to our affiliates; sales through affiliate links may benefit this site.

TOP's links!

(To see all the comments, click on the "Comments" link below.)
Featured Comments from:

Jimmy Renfro: "'Pea pod' babies—any newborn dressed and posed in a way that mimics Anne Geddes. Converse sneakers in grass. Shots looking up or down long, winding staircases that form a spiral. Birds eating something alive. Birds flying, especially hummingbirds. Birds just sitting there staring. Butterflies with extreme bokeh. Dragonflies. Abandoned old boats high and dry on beaches. Mountains. Lightning. Produce. Old skeletal cars or tractors in fields. People riding bicycles. Any wedding photo with a warm, hazy, film-aping retro filter. Old bearded Hindu men that give the impression of being gurus. Anything to do with a Holi festival. That robot restaurant in Shinjuku. Rural barns and bridges. (I'll stop now, before I smash my camera and take up drinking again.)"

Torgeir Frøystein: "In Norway we have a kitsch cliché: 'Moose in sunset.' It is so well known it is used to name clichés. Like in: 'That is so Moose in sunset.' Which of course leads to the clichés of landscape photography, that makes it so hard to be a good landscape photographer."

Chuck Albertson: "Tourists snapping selfies in front of the red phone booths on Parliament Square. Even in the dead of winter, every time I turn the corner coming out of the Westminster tube station, I have to wade through a mob of them."

Richard: "If we keep this up, there won't be anything to take photos of."

Mike R: "I'll borrow one I've heard from a couple of watercolor painters: ARAT—'Another Rock, Another Tree.'"

David Dyer-Bennet: "Reflections. Mist/fog over water. Buildings rising out of fog. But you know, I haven't found my interest in any of these heavily-shot subjects to have been worn out."

Ken_T: "My, we're a cynical lot! Might as well hang up the cameras and become Internet trolls. I photograph for two reasons: 1) to make a living, in which case I aim to please the customer, and 2) for personal satisfaction, in which I aim to please myself. In neither case do I care whether anyone else considers my photographs clichéd."

Mike replies: You've made an easy mistake—we're not talking about your photographs. Indeed we're not talking about anybody's photographs. We're talking about clichéd subjects. More thoughts to come on how it relates—stay tuned.

richardplondon: "That genre that I had a longstanding ambition to explore...until I discovered it to be really difficult (grin)."

Paul: "Asking for a list is a cliché."

Comments

[Carl Siracusa]

Rainbows. Even in photos with a cow.

[Andrew]

I nominate streaky headlights from long exposure.

Regarding your comment about tourists holding up the Tower of Pisa, I thought of Martin Parr's photograph:

https://www.google.ca/search?q=martin+parr+leaning+tower+of+pisa&espv=2&biw=900&bih=1379&tbm=isch&tbo=u&source=univ&sa=X&ei=UP1tVdalIJGZyQTfzYGYAg&ved=0CBwQsAQ

[Rodolfo Canet]

A pier and a lake. Just google both terms and you'll see how right I am...

[John Hagen]

Food has turned to a cliche. Actually, "the meal I am eating now," is the cliche.

16 or 17 years ago, there was something novel about whipping out my FM-2 (always on my shoulder) and making a photo of my meal. Now it feels novel not to make that photo and just eat.

[Mattias]

Waterfalls?

[Chris Y.]

Iceland definitely needs to give it a rest... Though by now the whole country is probably a photo-workshop based economy.

[Chester Williams]

Shadows? (PS.. the crudity was funny!)

[David B]

Windmills!
I have heard that entire categories have been created due to the sheer volume of windmill photos.
Now imagine a cat on a windmill in the sunset with sun flowers. Then you have yo.ur self covered

[Michael J. Metts]

I shoot weddings and we are constantly asked to get a shot where the entire wedding party jumps all at once.

[Ken Tanaka]

"Street" is certainly working its way up the "worst" scale.

How about "selfies"? They must be climbing past cats by now.

Of course it's worth noting that any cliché-type image can be executed beyond its class. So subject matter alone does not predestine an image to cliché. For vivid at-hand exhibits to fortify my thesis consider that any of Kate's subjects captured by lesser imaginations would likely land squarely into the bottomless cliché crevasse.

[jean-louis salvignol]

Waterfall at low speed, a setting sun in the background! Any comment would be redundant...and a cat in the foreground unnecessarily pedantic.

The horror of horrors: to photograph this with a Phase One pegged to a RRS.

[Stephen Scharf]

Cliche or no, I will always be taking pictures of my cat. And I hope Mike continues to take Butters pictures.

The cliche I am particularly fond of is squirrel pictures.

As Zack Aria says, "No review is complete without a squirrel photo."

[Nicholas Condon]

"Conventionally attractive woman" has got to be second, behind only "cat," on the cliched subject list. Both are there for the same reason: Lots of people like looking at both, even if the photograph has no merit beyond technical competence.

Other cliche subjects for the list might include "bucolic countryside," "unusual-looking rock," and (my personal favorite) "geometric architectural element."

[FFoto]

How about low-angle beach sunrises and sunsets with big lumpy rocks in the foreground?

[Dave Jenkins]

Even cliches need lovin' too! Seriously, I made a best-selling coffee table book about the hoariest of cliches -- old barns. My "Rock City Barns: A Passing Era" sold 29,000+ copies and won significant awards. It's now out of print, but amazon still has some copies. Some of the photos can be seen at www.silvermaplepress.com.

[Mike Chisholm]

Martin Parr did the Pisa image you're probably thinking of -- presumably now an ironic tourist cliche in its own right...

Mike

[Trevor Johnson]

A single tree.

[John Camp]

I'm currently reading a very good and funny novel by Paul Beatty called "The Sellout," in which he observes a young man lying on his back in Washington D.C., with his fly unzipped, and the Washington Monument apparently rising from it...Another version of the Leaning Tower shot.

There are quite a few "artistic" cliches -- a spray of flowers, usually from a flowering tree, isolated by shallow depth of field against a dark background. Pretty, but done a million times.

Kim Kardashian's butt...

[jim Wright]

Dogs

[Gary]

Wide angle, low view of pier, jetty, or similar feature centered and extending into the misty or foggy atmosphere above the still water. For a twist, add a dog, cat, or body on the end of the pier.

[Jim Simmons]

Well, duh, Mike - selfies! I'm not the first by any means, but about ten years ago I made a short film consisting solely of my selfies from the 1970s. That was a regular part of my practice at that time. All me on the right of frame and various individuals on the left of the frame. All shot with a 40mm Summicron, so tightly with placement of the heads fairly uniform from shot to shot. It was very gratifying that at a festival where it was shown, the audience asked if it could be screened a second time. This was long before the word selfie was in common usage, of course.

[Glenn Allenspach]

I suggest not a subject, but a process: HDR photography.

[ronin]

Taking random snapshots of random passersby on Manhattan streets.

[Martin]

The bigest cliche in photography are photos of homeless people.

[Bernd Reinhardt]

Definitely sunsets. There are a lot of good cat photographs and a lot of good flower photographs, but sunsets?

[Don Ross]

Photographs of people photographing cliches.

[Richard Nugent]

Here's a couple: lighthouses, blurred moving water, heavy HDR - any subject.

[Kalli]

Ruins, be they long abandoned buildings or rusting automobiles and similar.

[Me]

Selfies of idiots.

[Matt Patey]

I believe the shot you were thinking of the people posing in Pisa was the one by Martin Parr.

[Eric Kellerman]

Nude women in high heels and low earrings.

[Dave Morris]

Your Grandma's hands. (Courtesy of Britta, in Community)

[Bruce Appelbaum]

Long exposure photos of flowing water (waterfalls, rivers, lakes, etc.)

Any picture taken by any foreign tourist on a New York City bridge or street, especially with a selfie-stick (which should be licensed or illegal)

[Martin]

Abandoned urban locations

[Peter Nilsson]

peeling paint
shredded billboards

surely these should have been up there already?!

[John Chambers]

1. Lomography (can we kill this yet?)

2. Anything intended to look like an Ansel Adams photograph.

[Joseph Brunjes]

The ring in the bible casting a heart shaped shadow!

[James Sinks]

Portrait + clarity slider.

[Patrick Dodds]

A beautiful young (white) woman seemingly falling horizontally in a forest in a floaty dress.

[Jim]

All fisheye photos

[Guy Batey]

Abandoned chairs. And pianos.

[John Krumm]

"Glamour" photography in general, plus photo-illustrations of women in silky dresses in the mountains, often with selective saturation.

[Ruby]

The lone tree on a hill.

[Mike R]

Oh, this is depressing! Is there nothing I do that is not cliché?

I'll borrow one I've heard from a couple of watercolor painters: ARAT - Another Rock, Another Tree. (I also have had my fill of images of slot canyons, by the way, no matter how "artfully" done.)

[Frank]

Snow covered mountains with a lake in the foreground. People holding up landmarks - your satirical example is great. Iwo Jima war memorial. Jefferson Memorial with cherry blossom frame. Pictures of self and camera in (bathroom) mirror. Picture of your own shoes.

[James Bullard]

Photos made from a canoe with the bow of the canoe projecting into the bottom of the picture.

[Jon Porter]

Based on what I'd give up photography before I'd ever shoot, it would be weddings, wildlife and sports. While I appreciate the effort others have made with these subjects, it just seems to be the same pictures over and over again.

[Jim Freeman]

Well, there goes my entire pBase gallery. I think I'll take up crafting. 😀

[Nick Van Zanten]

Damn thanks Mike, 3600 pics in my "best" archive and I'm left with four. (Of course if you want to see them you'll have to pay.)

[kodiak xyza]

two trending cliches:
1. double exposure with dark tones showing the alternate exposures
2. underwater photography of person performing.

and already achieved:
"kinfolk" minimal/bright food/house photographs. (http://thekinspiracy.tumblr.com/)

[Jeremy T]

Long exposures of moving water, whether they be waves, rivers or waterfalls.

[Mikael Janghov]

1.Street scenes in Cuba with pre-revolution cars and people that are "poor but happy". 2.People standing proud with their arms crossed, confidently looking into the camera. If two persons, they are standing back to back. 3.Newborn baby grasping an adults finger with that tiny little hand. 4.Colourful underwater closeups of coral. 5.Wrinkled hands of old person,in b&w for extra drama. 6.Boxing gym where the evening sun cuts through the haze and the young fighter looks absentmindedly towards the horizon.
7.Any landscape image.Yes;Any. 8.Any photo of the "big five" shot from any landrover in any african national park.

[Michael Cytrynowicz]

People jumping over water puddles (except for Henri's)

[Russ]

"Slot canyons"? Never seen one, don't even know what one is. Obviously one man's cliche is another man's discovery!

[Oh, you've seen them. Just Google them and you'll realize you've seen them. --Mike]

[Michael Cytrynowicz]

Anthropomorphic bell peppers (except Edward's thirtieth)

[Michael Cytrynowicz]

Pisa: hilarious!!! but what makes it genius is the girl, of course

[Peter]

Empty rooms with an old television on a stand; backlit long-haired young women in a field; crappy taxidermy; gas stations a la Stephen shore

[Judith Wallerius]

Burning candles, often in front of some out-of-focus scenery.
Half-filled wine glasses in front of some out-of-focus scenery.
The sun, peeking through various kinds of openings (between buildings, chain links, a couple holding hands, leaves of tall trees in woods seen from below).
Long-exposure water flowing over mossy rocks.
Wide scenery with single tiny person going about their business in the distance.
Rainbows.
Kids.

[Hans Muus]

Long exposures of moving water. Sulky looking female nudes. Old mediteranean men with cigarettes playing cards. Paris. Landscapes with a full moon. Dirty industrial areas in low key rendering. Mirror self portraits with most of the face hidden behind a camera. Lonely American gas stations. People in trains. Reflections in water presented upside down.

[Chuck]

Looks like King Solomon was right:

"What has been will be again,
what has been done will be done again;
there is nothing new under the sun." Ecclesiastes 1:9

[Patrick Dodds]

Oh and those bloody trees in Namibia.

[Alan Hill]

Buds in spring and autumnal leaves, either close up or scenic.
But I respectfully disagree with Mr Renfro about birds flying or eating things, alive or dead, those shots are hard to do really well. A cliché is always too easy.

[David Paterson]

It's never the subject-matter which is the cliche, but the use made of it, ie. the image.

[Dave in NM]

Everything in Utah.

[Harvey Bernstein]

1. Rays of sunlight streaming through parted clouds.
2. Tropical beaches framed by coconut palms.
3. Cowboys on horses.

[Kurt Shoens]

Musicians in front of brick walls. Musicians in the vicinity of train tracks.

[Warren Garrett]

Is there anything left to photograph that isn't a cliche?

[Nick Hunt]

Willowy young woman with heavy make-up, wispy clothing, lying on: forest floor/floor of ruined building/rock on beach/floor of ruined building with a forest growing in it. Or floating in water, with lilies. Sometimes petals and/or leaves are involved, and the very worst have Photoshopped mermaid's tails added.

For some reason, the deranged algorithms at Flickr seems to think I like this kind of photo, and offer them to me at every opportunity.... I can only assume that in a past life I committed a heinous aesthetic crime, and this is my punishment.

PS I have just seen one where she is holding a burning book. Agh!

[Richard Hinton]

Over here, on Michigan's west coast, we joke about the ultimate photo being a kitty cat holding a flower in front of one of Michigan's iconic lighthouses during a sunset.

[Doug Howk]

Tintypes/wet-plate collodion images of re-enactors. Followed by same process but with minimal DOF portraits and numerous technical imperfections. I'm surprised nobody has created a Photoshop filter for digitally emulating them.

[John Willard]

Worse than being a cliche, as discussed many times, dangerous too, posing on railroad tracks.

[Bob]

Bug and Flower Macros.

[Nick]

I think the 'entire country of Iceland' is quite unfair! Might as well just add say "any street photograph taken in NYC" or "any thai monks with orange robes". But please don't, I think the list is too general already!

[Nick Hunt]

More seriously - the painter Francis Bacon had a horror of 'falling into' cliché, arguing that the empty canvas is actually no such thing - it is crowded with latent clichés. The job of the painter is therefore to avoid the clichés that are already present. Bacon had specific strategies to achieve this, including making 'random' marks on the canvas, flicking and scrubbing paint on to make marks that belong more to the hand than the intellect. He would then incorporate these marks into the painting, or use them to prompt a way of painting.

Does anyone know of photographers who introduce deliberately 'random' or non-intellectualised factors as a way to avoid cliché?

[Gene Lowinger]

All in the list you posted except for the dog photos. As you mentioned in your editorial comment, there's no such thing as a cliche dog photo because each and every dog that has ever lived, is alive now, or ever will live (from here to eternity) is unique and special.

[I. M.]

Light.

[Ed Grossman]

Bird on a stick (the camera club classic). Photos of famous landmarks taken from where the tour bus stopped. Insect macros.

Yes, I'm grouchy today...

[Robert Hudyma]

Outhouses, featured in a book by Sherman Hines.

http://www.amazon.ca/Outhouses-East-Ray-Guy/dp/0920852033

[Kefyn Moss]

With 300 million photos uploaded every day (or whatever the current figure is) there isn't much that isn't a photographic cliché these days. Maybe photography has unfortunately become the cliché.

[Geoff Wittig]

Sunrise under Mesa Arch.
No, really. I've attended a number of otherwise excellent landscape photography workshops going back about 20 years, and most of them included a critique session. And I would need both hands to count the number of attendees who showed essentially the exact same photo of the sunrise glow illuminating Mesa Arch from below. I suspect that most if not all were taken during a previous workshop. Might as well leave one tripod bolted to the ground, and have each 'photographer' take his/her turn planting a camera on top and hitting the shutter.

[Roger Overall]

Milk foam art on top of coffee. (A cliche for the iPhone Age).

[Adam]

Anyone under the age of thirty shooting film with extra demerits if developed in rodinal with excessive grain. Film would most certainly die if taken off hipster life support. And while we're at it, can we include verbal clichés? I'd propose calling lenses 'glass' and ,the worst, referring to developer/ developing as 'soup'

[Kenneth Wajda]

People on cell phones doing nothing interesting. f1.2 wedding photos.

[Tom V]

Thirty five photographic ideas, at least twenty five of which I haven't used yet!

Thanks!

[Alex]

At the risk of earning eternal hatred (said tongue
-n-cheek), photographer selfies taken by capturing the reflection of themselves and their cameras in a mirror.

On a different note, given the rate of diffusion of imaging devices in the general public (and that is increasingly on a wold-wide scale), perhaps most potential topics will become cliche in a few years.

[Adam]

Heavily pregnant woman's belly embraced by husband with parent's thumbs and index fingers forming a concentric heart shape over said belly.

'Cinematic' color rendering

[Rob]

Holy crap! What's left to photograph now that the cliche police have declared so many subjects out of bounds? I agree that some subjects are uber-cliches that should permitted only to top tier photographers, but such an all encompassing list is intimidating to many others who are just trying to enjoy the practice of photography. Lighten up, folks.

[You're putting your own interpretation on this. Who declared anything out of bounds? Who is saying anything about anyone being "permitted" to do anything? We don't issue permits here!

Wait till tomorrow for more. --Mike]

[Paul Amyes]

My, my. Now we have smugly proved that our sense os aesthetics is superior to that of the great unwashed we have found that all of photography is but a cliche. I think after following this blog since it started its time to move on, the entries for this subject show that this a place for crusty old farts who don't like anyone having fun with photography and who wish that the last twenty of photographic democratization hadn't happened.

[JB]

This is not the first time that you ask a meaning-of-life question disguised as a joke. My farther-in-law passed away today, and all the pictures I can find of him are nothing but cliches, but how precious they are. This is why we take them.

[Tony Rowlett]

I suspect the bottom line answer here will be: "Anything not completely off-the-wall weird." Being as subjective as it is and that it all depends on your own surroundings and experiences and exposure to photography, calling something a cliche is as weak as proclaiming that if somebody eats ice cream more than once because he or she likes it, they must be addicted to it. Up here, a moose eating our shrubbery on our front lawn is cliche!

[Dennis]

Close ups of elderly Indian mens faces processed with the clarity slider pushed to 100.

Peggy's Cove.

Ultra wide angle shots taken in a field of wildflowers.

Broken/dirty dolls on the ground.

Abandoned buildings.

Follow up question: once you have a 'final' list ... ask readers how many of those cliches they have "keepers" of. (Only edit it so that it doesn't end with "of" !)

[Dennis]

Following on from my suggested follow up question, another fun thread (or subject for a book) could be "best of the worst" ... show us your best shots of these worst cliches. (But then does best mean shots that best exemplify the cliche or those that succeed despite the cliche ? I think I'd rather see the latter).

[Morey]

radial star paths...

[Trecento]

Hi Mike.
I think I see where you are going with this. You are having us make a list of tropes, right?

I definitely see value in doing that! (And if you haven't poked around the TV Tropes site before, I do encourage you to try it out. Here's a sample - you know that thing in crime shows where they "enhance" an image to see things that are convenient to the plot? Yes, this: http://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/EnhanceButton

[Manuel]

Indian men (either brahmins or sikhs, as long as they have beards and wear turbans)smoking, with the smoke hovering in front of their faces. This kind of photography is becoming disturbingly popular, especially if made with resource to HDR. It can make you wish Steve McCurry had never been born.

[Jamie Pillers]

Park bench bokeh

[Jim Hamstra]

Dried cracked mud

[Jamie Pillers]

And regarding #33 above, if the selfie in the bathroom is taken with Deardorff 8x10, its art.

[Andrea B.]

The Eiffel Tower from any angle in any light.

[Glen Rowe]

Subjects whose form is rendered accessible to the film or sensor through the presence of direct, reflected, and/or refracted light.