Great British Photography Challenge, review: the digital camera never ever lies – but, boy, it may be dull
The BBC’s brand new competition show produced some exemplary snaps, but photography appears too personal an art for this format that is frenetic
It’s catching. The trend for naming all-and-sundry “The Great British…” is really so infectious even the Transport Secretary has arrived straight down along with it. The other day, give Shapps announced the federal government will be bringing all train lines underneath the control over Great British Railways.
Finding a stripy marquee large enough for them shall be tricky. But at the very least laying in to the Beeching cuts in the place of soggy bottoms could make a noticeable change for Prue and Paul.
For the time being, the BBC has revealed the pretender that is latest to Bake Off’s sugar-dusted crown, Great British Photography Challenge (BBC Four). The format had been familiar: six photographers compete over one month, doing three “assignments” an episode, until one is called winner that is overall. But unlike Bake Off et al, the focus had been on enhancement perhaps not competition – no-one gets eradicated, and also the photographers build a portfolio of 15 of these most useful pictures for display during the final end associated with the show. That event, judged by industry leaders, is where their fate will be determined.
The show’s mentor/taskmaster ended up being the style professional photographer Rankin. Into the opening episode we had been introduced into the rivals at his London that is north studio. In a way, it had been the maximum amount of of a cliche since the sunlight and skipping lambs of Bake Off’s stately house setting – hard walls that are whitewashed redundant acres of frosted cup and shield-walls of gleaming Macs. The gown rule, from Rankin towards the bright young things who flitted about with interesting haircuts, ended up being uniformly black colored.
Nevertheless, there is a welcome variety to the competitors. They ranged from cocksure 21-year-old Scottish landscape professional photographer Jackson to Paul, a softly-spoken northerner in their sixties with a passion for “lying in areas all day failing woefully to just take photographs of animals”. An additional shake-up, they certainly were additionally pretty decent currently. (Instagram, all things considered, has you covered in the event that you’ve a hankering for really terrible amateur photography.)
Their assignment that is first Brighton’s pewter skies, ended up being one hour to fully capture a graphic which reacted to “#Beach” using their phones. During the feedback session a while later, Rankin had been unsparing: “Don’t give me personally a postcard. If my gran took it, We wouldn’t want it.”
Things got sunnier within the task that is second a charming ramble through the New Forest followed closely by Chris Packham, recording the “fragility of nature”. Packham’s passion for their woodland home had been energising; along with his self-deprecatory methods for taking unforeseen pictures for the world that is natural truly interesting (“I understand whenever I’ve got the image because my swearing reaches a crescendo”.) The snaps that are resulting particularly road professional photographer Tryone’s surrealistic compositions, had been exemplary.
This expansive freedom shrunk significantly within the episode’s last task, a frenetic 15-minute fashion shoot with a take-no-prisoners Anna Friel. The shoot geed up the energy only a little. But it addittionally highlighted the show’s fundamental identification problem: it couldn’t determine whether or not it wished to be a pacy competition or a serious photography programme.
As whoever has ever been caught on vacation with a passionate shutterbug will testify, viewing other folks just take pictures 
is dull work. And even though a number of the feedback the rivals received had been revelatory – contemporary photography is a “three-way discussion between context, creator and community, aided by the creator the smallest amount of important component” – other insights had been eye-rollingly insipid. “It reminds me personally of cells,” opined one of Rankin’s assistants of a close-up of a leaf, “and we are made from cells, so that it works.”
Rankin, too, might be a figure that is titanic fashion photography (among other achievements, he founded the hipsterish magazine Dazed). But as a presenter, he had been just a little not sure on their foot; and stylistic tics, such as for instance misplaced Lord Sugar-style video clip briefings, compounded the wobbliness. The tone had been similarly uncertain, jerking between jocularity and acerbic critique. I came across myself wishing for Matt Lucas or Katherine Ryan to pop-up with an innuendo or two. It absolutely was telling that the section that is strongest had been this new Forest series. Under Packham’s certain way, the photographers calm and begun to expose their characters, a prerequisite of these types of programs.
When you look at the end, possibly photography is just too personal a creative art form to be effectively gamified. “Photographs are experience captured,” penned Susan Sontag. “And the digital camera may be the perfect supply of awareness in its mood that is acquisitive. Consciousness is not really compressible into a neat hour-long competition structure. This is certainly, until the next BBC commissioners’ spitballing session: The Great British Mindfulness Session, possibly?