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

[Gordon Brown]

Nude woman passed out on the forest floor amid the ferns.

Bugling elk.

Close-up pictures of rocks. Also called sensitive rock pictures.

[Jamie Pillers]

The Leica posing next to the early morning cappuccino hasn't been put on the list, has it? God, I hope not!!

[Jon Shiu]

old leather boots

[John Berger]

OK, got a pretty good start on cliched subjects-now how 'bout the list of fresh, new as yet unexplored subjects ?

[Robert Harshman]

water droplets on anything, you've got one in your print sale.

[Jamie Pillers]

By the way, I see that Lensbaby has just come out with the "Velvet 56" lens which allows you to turn ANYTHING into a cliche... sweet!!

[Michael Ward]

There is an indefinable element buried deep in the human psyche that makes the content of the above list both pleasurable and comfortable for creators and viewers alike. It varies between different countries but is always present. It is up to the individual creator to reinterpret as he of she sees fit. The best example of this rethoric is as I am sure you would appreciate Mike, is music and classical music in particular...

[Mike R]

Filters or "effects" that want you to believe that the image was scanned (and badly masked) from film - 4x5" or larger.

[Steven Palmer]

What, no "children" on the list? And only one person in the comments who lists them. Children really need to be put on the list. And a note to all parents, no-one is interested in looking at photos of your children.

[John Boeckeler]

Here in Maine: Lighthouses; dinghies, esp. when tied up in groups at the dinghy dock.

[Roger]

Over sharpened, odd contrast, over clarified portraits. I often wonder how I would react to seeing someone who actually looked like that. Pretty much the same for Photoshopped skin tones.

[Gordon Buck]

I can only dream of photographing a lake with pier in sunset that includes an old barn with peeling paint – or no paint. Naturally, an old tractor is in a foreground of wild flowers mixed in with the crop. The pier has boats in a row and the shoreline includes an old abandoned boat - obviously! A lone tree is alongside the barn.

On the other hand, I would not put a nude woman in high heels wearing low earrings holding a half-filled glass of wine in the tractor! Surely anyone can see that would be a bit over-the-top!

[Ger Lawlor]

Excellent post Mike. HDR landscapes......

[Mick Ryan]

Mike, I know I'm bing pedantic but: I don't think a subject can be cliche, it can only be a subject. How it is photographed can be a cliche.

[Dave Karp]

Everything!

[Adrian]

Yosemite Valley. I.M. Pei's Louvre pyramids. Saffron-robed monks in Angkor Thom. Ficus tree strangling anything in Angkor. Anything in Prague. Any gritty street in Tokyo, shot in grainy film. Stonehenge. Anything in Australia. Any Inca construction. Any bridge near San Francisco. Mount Rainier. The Matterhorn. Everest.

[Andrew Molitor]

That one picture of the shoreline with the rocks in the foreground surrounded by mist (waves rendered with a Lee Big Stopper, natch), and then a curve of shoreline around the right edge of the frame turning in to a spit of land projecting back across the frame exactly 2/3 of the way up, across exactly 2/3 of the frame, with the sun setting behind it exactly 1/3 of the frame across from right to left.

500px is an entire website devoted to this picture, I think?

[Wayne]

Tall buildings shot from ground level.

[Trecento]

Black and white photos of groups of musicians glaring at the camera. Bonus points if half are looking goofy staring in another direction.

[Glenn Brown]

Railway tracks should be first on list

[Darin Boville]

An important variation on the billowy dresses mentioned above: Nudes in dark forested areas/eroded rocks/run down industrial buildings.

Plus Cala Lillies. They get their own category, separate from "Flowers."

--Darin

[Andrew]

In reference to long exposures of moving water. This effect is often just a by-product of landscape photography technique.

1. Base ISO for best image quality
2. Small aperture to render everything in focus
3. Sometimes a polarizer to cut glare
4. Indirect light to keep highlights under control

The result? slow shutter speeds. The camera is on a tripod, so shutter speed is not a priority. Lots of landscape shots are in the quarter second or slower range. Such is life.

[Al C.]

It's been 180 years since the 1st photograph was taken. So I'd say just about everything has been the subject for uncountable number of aspiring photographers. Thus, I submit, there are no non-cliché subjects left -- period. Even the accidental catch has become cliché, no thanks to HCB and his legion of imitators. Who are we kidding?

[Martin]

Attractive young couple embracing on city street. Wind blown sand dunes. Close up of two cupped hands holding out some fresh produce, always with small depth of field.

[Don Daso]

Anything w/railroad tracks, whether the perspective is important or not...

[Ranjit Grover]

The worst cliché is photographing a photographer with his camera in the foreground on a tripod and his hand on the top of the camera.
I wonder how would a surgeon or butcher be photographed.
The second worst is shooting with film (black and white) in this digital era.

[raizans]

Raindrops or dew on leaves.
Corridors to show "perspective."
Photo of a woman's throat with her head tilted back (after Man Ray).
Frontal view of a woman with skinny thighs, taken from a low vantage point so as to be able to see some butt cheek (sort of crass, but it's been everywhere for several years now).
Painted lines on the street.
Shadows of people walking across the street.
Street photos of people taken from behind.
Time-exposure of one person in the center standing still while everyone else is streaky.
Protests.
Leafless bushes or trees that look like a Pollock.
Alien landscapes, with or without people.
Graffiti or street art, or people while they're making it.
Someone floating in water.
A hand holding a print so that it aligns with the background.
Rowdy, wild, lithe, often naked white teenagers being free and easy.

[John Krill]

I guess the biggest clichés of all is the 'List of Clichés'.

I started to examine the list and stopped reading when I realized I done the first four in just the last couple of weeks.

Somebody please tell me what isn't a clichés and I will go right out and shot it before it becomes a clichés.

[Globules]

Holding a photograph of a scene in front of the scene itself.

A distorted reflection of one building in the facade of another.

[Mathew Hargreaves]

Infrared photos with channel reversal to swap the colors. Like it is the only color alteration that is available for IR. I may have tried it once and found it lacking.

[Paulo Bizarro]

People.

[Yonatan Katznelson]

Artfully lit Spider webs, with or without dew drops.

And dogs.

[Mikey]

Whew! Looks like classic cars and airplanes are still safe!

[Well, they were until right now. --Mike the evil Ed.]

[Brad Nichol]

Of course todays bleeding edge becomes tomorrows kitsch cliche, who can forget "brides in wineglasses" brides and grooms floating in front of stained glass windows" and all those other double explosure montage abominations of the late 70s to late 80s. I bet there are more than a few wedding albums that have mysteriously gone missing in action.

[Ken N]

An undressed or underdressed celebrity as photographed by Annie Leibovitz?

[David]

Anything shot through a lens -- or with a camera.

[Dave]

Some subjects just naturally make aesthetically pleasing photos. Most of the listed cliche subjects are fairly easy to photograph and they give the novice a glimpse at the potential of photography. Taking cliche photos is kind of like hitting the open E-minor chord on an electric guitar, any beginner can do it and it sounds bad-ass. By the same token, an experienced guitarist still gets the same thrill from hitting that fat, juicy chord, but he's probably also figured out a way to bake it into a tasty riff.

[Ben]

Pictures of people taking pictures.

Bright colors in the third world.

[Bryce Lee]

Just born humanoids and their parents.

Baby anything, be it animals, birds, whatever.

People who believe digital imagery is the be all and end all.

[B.J. Segel]

Fall color.

Any landscape with the saturation slider cranked way up.

[Niko X]

Power lines / power towers.

[Edwin]

Traditional bull race - SUWANDA Deddy - Indonesia. A must have picture if you belong to a camera club here in Asia....
And there're at least twenty entries in every "photo contest".
And Terraced Fields -- Those amazing 9th wonders of the world.... during the seeding season when they flood the fields, with the sunrise or sunset reflected off the water. And of course a farmer in "traditional costume" walking behind a cow.

[Norm Nicholson]

One thats been with me since childhood: People in the water splashing each other.

[Sarge]

1) pictures of clouds with dust spots in them
2) pictures of clouds without dust spots

[David Dyer-Bennet]

When I've wanted to do the blurred water cliches in the last decade, I've needed help -- base ISO plus safe good aperture on modern equipment result in much to short exposures to really get the effect (1/4 second is nowhere near enough with most water I've worked with). I actually own a 6-stop neutral density filter for this (and occasionally wish I'd bought the next one up).

It certainly started out as something photographers basically couldn't avoid; but that was LONG long ago.

[David Dyer-Bennet]

So, when we get this list completed and prioritized and cut off at the proper point (so we have in fact the worst 50 cliches, or whatever number you choose), I presume the next step in the program is the contest to see who can first exhibit an example of each one from their own work?

[Mr. Film]

How about anything that has been photographed dozena, hundreds or thousands of times... oops that covers just about everything.

[Aashish Sharma]

Mike,
This post (and comments) just made it to the top 3 of my all time favorites from your blog! Made my day, too. :-)
Here are some cliches that I've been guilty of (over)clicking:
1. Close-ups of sand on the beach
2. Slow shutter shots of flowing water
3. Reflections
4. Macros of computer keyboards!
5. Church ceilings and facades

[Rod Thompson]

Unfortunately photography as a whole, but I still like it. Also all HDR..GRRR
And clothes on a line.

[Gary Nylander]

There are no cliches, its only a state of mind, everything is photographical.

[Jeff Kott]

Babies feet.

[Mick]

Re: 32. You can't have lone trees ;-)

[David Cope]

Art photographers avoiding clichés is the new cliché.

[James W.]

Desert highway disappearing into the distance.

[Rico Ramirez]

Photo of someone standing near a moving, blurred train popular with street photographers.

[Steve Smith]

Bored musicians in front of an old brick wall with one of them looking in the wrong direction.

[David Lonsdale]

No one mentioned front three-quarter views of steam locos and panned shots of racing cars. There, those are my main subjects...cliches but I enjoy taking them and boring friends with the results!

[Lynn]

Texture blending! I once visited a camera club (surely the original fount of all things cliched) where if it wasn't texture blended, it wasn't considered artful. I've rarely felt so uncomfortable, and had to endure endless pictures of leaf patterns blended with every other imaginable cliche (including travel pictures, of all things) before I could make my escape.

It cured me of any desire to join a camera club, by the way.

[Peter]

Blue sky from the window of the plane you are travelling with. Add wing and some clouds.

[Pak-Ming Wan]

Not a bad list: here's my contribution...

"Head and shoulders portrait with lens wide open, with lots of background blur."

Pak

[Hans Muus]

May I suggest to group all clichés in a set: 'All pictures that can be adequately described in less than ten words' ?

[Dave]

Talking of Martin Parr - http://www.martinparr.com/2011/photographic-cliches/

[Dave Stewart]

Long exposures of steel wool on fire, and swirled about... haven't tried that one yet. Bit hazardous.

The Moon!

And a recent one, that will only increase - aerial shots from drones.

Think I'm guilty of more than half the list so far, at some time.

The Kessock Bridge - personal one, that I do "Blips" of, or from, far too often. Well, I do cycle over it most workdays.

Castles - locally Inverness Castle.

Statues with traffic cones on their heads, or wearing sports team scarves.

Politicians in maternity wards.

Other local ones - dolphins, or bits of dolphins, heilan coos (Highland cattle).

Fields of Oilseed Rape.

Who's managaed to get the most of these into just one photo?

[Ian Land]

Pictures of my daughter. I've seen thousands of em, and she's only just two years old...

[Ian Land]

Narrow focus wet plate collodion portraits. Collodion still lifes featuring skulls and old bones, dolls heads, and other Gothic ephemera. Who'd have guessed a 19th century process would become a visual cliche in the 21st century?

[Sten]

Poles in water.

[Tim]

1) The aethereal tones of Silver EFX applied to a contrasty black&white long exposure.

2) Views straight up architecture (multiple buildings) to a fragment of sky beyond.

3) Combinations of both of the above.

4) IR-filtered foliage.

[louis mccullagh]

Cliches are a bucket list we work through from the time we first hold a camera. We get waylaid by some but we move on but like the maturity of our emotions, politics we can only keep moving on if we keep working on them.

[Len Salem]

Beginning photographers with artistic inclinations, and almost all photography students, photograph their feet fairly early on in their journey through the medium.
This is subsequently followed by images which include their own shadow...

[Bob Johnston]

My vote would be for selfies but
here in the UK the amateur exhibition circuit has always had its cliches. Some current ones are:

Frightening man probably with tattoos and piercings in front of wall taken at an angle with a 20mm lens. Woman in 18th century garb standing on a cliff looking forlornly out to a ship at sea. Goth person among gravestones at Whitby. Nude sitting on floor of abandoned building (those rough floorboards must hurt). Nude crouched in corner of stairway (I have lost count of the essentially identical images of this staircase that I have seen,in a thankfully now closed, disused hospital). Magritte style men with bowler hat and umbrellas in weird arrangement of random street objects. Some of it probably comes about as a result of people thinking that they know how to make art with Photoshop and thus avoid a cliche. Then everyone copies the style, they all start winning awards and we have our next cliche.

[tex andrews]

As has been stated above a couple or so times, starting to look like pretty much everything is a cliche, because now with billions upon billions of images uploaded each week, absolutely everything is done and re-done, and worse, now we can all know about it, which was much harder before. Maybe that accounts a little for the comments Mary Ellen Mark made about the death of her type of photojournalism (as way to make a living) today: pain and suffering has become a cliche (probably has been for thousands of years...)

[Robert Roaldi]

Those pictures of lone people standing around in an art gallery.

How about conceptual photos that were never actually taken. They all look alike to me.

[Richard Alan Fox]

My favorite photos are those of cameras on seamless.

[scott kirkpatrick]

This, I sincerely hope, is not a cliche:

http://www.getdpi.com/forum/643399-post2450.html

(not my picture)

scott

[Dan Montgomery]

Faces.
And yet such photos contain endless variety and, for the photographer, opportunity, and we'll never get tired of good photographs of faces.

[Lindsay Bach]

I'm guilty. Cf. Marshall McLuhan's "From Cliche to Archetype." McLuhan's thesis (for what is is worth, which may not be much), was that archetypes are nothing more than aged cliches, or the cliches that have remained with us. I haven't looked at the book in more than 40 years but I remember it for its wonderful collection of epigrammatic quotes, e.g. "Laughter is nervous energy attacking the muscles of the face." Wyndham Lewis.

[Neil A]

In the UK, swans, especially two of them with their necks "artfully" arranged to form a heart shape.

[Art]

As should be obvious from this burgeoning list: representational photography.
I think that about covers it.

[BrianW]

This is my new to-do list! And yay, I'm nearly halfway done already...

[M. Guarini]

The Half Dome

[Markr]

There is a variant of the pier shot that I find particularly overdone. Specifically, the "under the pier at dusk with a very long exposure." Bonus cliché points added if it's in black and white.

[Stuart Hamilton]

The entire content of my Lightroom catalogs.

[Dan]

Not sure if I should start a year-long photo project to knock off cliche's I've yet to photograph (12,24,29,30,31,32 and 34) or a year-long photo project with none of these subjects.

[Tom]

Birds in Flight are a Cliche. They all look pretty much the same.

[David Saxe]

36 cliches listed and I am guilty of taking at one time or another every one of them. Most of these type of shots are crap, not because they are cliches but because they are uninteresting, but every now and then one of them rises above the ooze. One never knows—and I love surprises!

[D. Hufford.]

Forgotten were Shibuya crossing (Tokyo) and Japanese snow monkeys. Foreigners taking photos of Shibuya crossing is so commonplace, Japanese comment on it. One could, however, take photos of the zillions of mostly foreigners taking photos of Shibuya crossing.

[Fred Mueller]

I think the task of avoiding cliches will paralyze you as a photographer or certainly stunt growth. Even the struggle to avoid cliches is almost cliche itself. Just let go!

We should be photographing and photographing a lot to allow our voice to emerge, to find confidence in our own vision unencumbered by what we think we should or should not photograph. The best advice I think we can give anyone trying to take photography to the level beyond record snapshots is to learn the art of those who came before you and then emulate those for which you have the most affinity. Be not afraid!

Do not fear that you lack originality by imitating Ansel Adams or Weston or Friedlander or Eggleston or (fill in the blank), soon enough your own vision will creep in and begin to dominate simply because you are photographing without self imposed restrictions.

The photographs will be yours.

[Huw Morgan]

Cows at sunrise, cars on a misty road, cow backs as horizons. It ain't about the subject. Just sayin'

[PhotoDes]

Doors and windows

[Roger Bradbury]

Those grip and grin photos, as seen in many a newspaper, are a terrible cliche, one which my eye slides over in search of something interesting.

Another cliche, seen in the news sheets of local parish councillors, is the said councillor looking pleased pointing at something they've had fixed (a pothole, a fence, a sign) or looking grim pointing at something that hasn't been fixed yet.

[Anton W]

Resolution charts and brick walls with wide angle lenses...
Almost 200 comments and no one opted for the open goal on the gear head community?! Cheap shot but somebody had to say it.

[ctein]

Damn.

If I still had a cat, I could sooooo trifecta this.

pax / Ctein

(but, I have verbed "trifecta," so it's already a good day)

[Mike]

1). Piers or pier ruins leading into the misty ocean. 2). Shaped bushes and hedges. In other words, anything by Michael Kenna.

[Winsor]

Apparently everything is a cliche subject. Few have seen the inside of my house. So pictures of that become interiors with overexposed windows cliches. Or interior with HDR perfectly exposed windows cliches. Or interiors with drapes cliches. A beautiful black and white portrait is cliche as is all of black and white street photography.

Put everything into a category and it is a cliche because you have tossed out the specifics of the shot. This is a silly exercise.

[Dave Rogers]

Milky Way. Star circles. Flaming steel wool. Lego minifigs.

[Tom Fid]

Aurora and Milky Way shots are rapidly headed for cliche status.

Landscapes with selective focus tilt lens effects (or PS fake thereof).

My perennial favorite (not): phony gigantic moons pasted into a landscape.

[Ade]

You don't need a list, just look at the photography streams on Pinterest. Rain shots are my particular bugbear right now - who knew so many models like to frolic in monsoons wearing only a man's shirt?

[Andrew Molitor]

@Paul Amyes I think there's actually something going on here that's not quite that obvious.

We're in a new world, with billions of pictures. Every photograph that's any good is instantly copied. To a large degree there really isn't anything new any more. We, largely, no longer have Iconic Photographs. What we have are archetypes, iconic ideas for photographs if you will. I visualize these archetypal photos as "surrounded" by a cloud of actual photographs people have made. There's a sort of Platonic Ideal photo, and then a bunch of stuff on flickr etc. Each photograph is, in a sense, cheap, if only because it is one of 1000 more or less identical ones.

This isn't the fault of the photographers, this isn't a failure of imagination. This is simply reality.

Think of a contemporary photographer, and a really great photograph they've taken recently. Without much difficulty, you could find 10,000 Very Similar pictures.

Do you even think of contemporary photographers in terms of their iconic images, or is it more about the ideas and the bodies of work? I know I think of, say, Salgado quite differently than I think of Weston. Weston is A Pepper, Some Dunes, and A Couple Nudes. Salgado is a style and a set of ideas and themes. To me. His style is widely copied. His bodies of work -- his BOOKS -- are not.

I think photography has grown up. No longer can you stand out by simply taking a couple good pictures. You've got to have ideas, you've got to be able to execute bodies of work, you've got to be able to create a book's worth of material that hangs together stylistically, that embodies some coherent ideas, that says something as a corpus.

100 years ago you could just write good Haiku. Now you've got to be able to manage a novel.

It's a good thing.

(I wrote a bit more on this, on my blog, "The Death of the Iconic Photo" a few weeks back)

[Stephen Scharf]

I'm safe! Motorsports racing pictures are not on the list! ;-)

[NancyP]

With "everyone" now owning and using a cell phone camera, all possible subjects will be "cliched", that is, in some way similar to other photographs. So?

The fact that flowers are cliched subjects doesn't prevent me from seeking out local wildflowers in their native setting, being pollinated by the local insects.