The Clichéd View – part one
Clichés may be a little less common in photography than in, say, writing, but I would argue that they are more of a problem. The reason is that they are more difficult to avoid. A clichéd phrase can easily be replaced – you only have to use a thesaurus – but in photography there are some scenes that simply do not have very good alternative viewpoints. And while viewpoint does not rule every photograph, it very much applies to those large, fixed scenes and subjects that everyone has an opportunity to visit. Whether the Grand Canyon, Eiffel Tower or any popular magnet, the problem is that it’s all been done before.
Cliché has come to mean generally a trite or over-used idea, or in our case a photograph. And it is almost universally condemned, as a sign that whoever is using it is unimaginative, lacking in creativity or lazy, or all of these. That sounds reasonable, but wait a minute. How did clichés get to be in the first place? Almost none of them started as trite and commonplace. When the English photographer Francis Frith photographed the Sphinx and Pyramids in 1857, he brought back to the untravelled viewing public an amazing sight, all the better for not being shot with a tricky angle and parts obscured. Since then, it has become a postcard view, which in its own way goes to show that it was a popular view. Here, admittedly, we’re looking at ways to take our photography forward and work hard at it, but it might not be completely fair to dismiss tried and tested images out of hand. The American conceptual artist Jenny Holzer, best known for her text installations in public spaces, plays devil’s advocate: “Clichés are truth-telling, time tested, and short. These are all fine things in words. People attend to clichés, so important subject matter can be disseminated. Clichés are highly refined through time.”
It’s a provocative idea, but doesn’t help us much with the problem of the obvious, acknowledged, ‘perfect’ viewpoint. Does it even exist? Or rather, according to what taste does it exist? First, let me mention a special case, which is when the intention of the creator of a scene or subject was to control the view. One such example, a famous view of Blenheim Palace which Randolph Churchill called with some justification “the finest view in England“. The 4th Duke of Marlborough employed Lancelot ‘Capability’ Brown in 1765 to re-design the gardens. He created the lake and this highly engineered view, which greets the visitor arriving through the Woodstock Gate by carriage. I was shooting a story on Blenheim for the Smithsonian, and so had access at any time, and was able to explore this viewpoint minutely. It soon became obvious that the view, which takes in the house, lake and bridge, is extremely precise, to within a few paces. To shoot in any other way, it seemed to me, would be perverse. Lighting is the only variable.
"The finest view in England" - Blenheim Palace as designed to be seen by a visitor arriving by coach through the Woodstock Gate.
Natural un-designed views, however, rely on consensus. One practical consideration is simple efficiency – as long as the subject is agreed on, and is something concrete and straightforward, such as a rock formation or a building, then only a limited number of viewpoints will show it recognisably. There would be little point, for example, in photographing the rock arch shown here side-on. Unless, of course, you were being extremely ironic and doing this to challenge the viewer’s assumptions – making a kind of conceptual image. A second consideration is what people expect to see in terms of a satisfying angle and pleasing proportions. This is where we get into the issue of normal versus cutting edge, and the essential conservatism of what most people like.
Interestingly, there is a measure of the common denominator of public taste, and that is the sales of stock photography. This is really where the marketplace for photography now resides, with many millions of images licensed for sale and accessible online. In whatever commercial area – travel destinations, fashion, lifestyle – the really big earners are images that sell over and over and, simply because of being sold and reproduced so many times have become, in effect, clichés. Creatively that might not be a good thing, but financially it could hardly be better. The founder of one of the most successful stock agencies of the 1980s and 1990s remarked that 90 percent of the sales came from 10 percent of the images.
Strategies employed by successful stock photographers (those who’s primary business is shooting for stock) are instructive, because they are dealing with cliché-prone material (as I write this, a check on a major on-line stock site shows more than 12,000 hits for a search on ‘Eiffel Tower’). I’m indebted to my friend Steve Vidler, one of the most successful travel stock photographers of all time, and one of our previously featured photographers, for explaining how this works. Rule one is to concentrate on what you know will sell, which demands the discipline of not getting side-tracked into the unusual – which is probably the opposite of what many photographers would do. Instead of ‘dare to be different’, successful stock photography means identifying with both the mass of final viewers and the picture editors who are catering to them. This research would lead Vidler, for example, to shoot a well-known site with a tourist couple prominently in view – a couple that a reader could identify with. “Tourists in front of the Eiffel Tower: how boring or naff you might think. But bear in mind that this type of image is one of the most sought-after in the travel industry.” While acknowledging that it has “certainly become increasingly difficult to get a different slant on the iconic subjects because of the sheer volume of imagery and choice available to image buyers“, Vidler sees it as a challenge rather than a cause for despair. He makes sure that he is on-site before dawn, in good weather, and will work hard to compose the shot with some extra element, such as a reflection or, in the case in question, a street and attractive café with the Eiffel Tower in the background.
Cliché, as Jenny Holzer wrote, may not be such a bad thing after all, and instead of a knee-jerk dismissal of a view as too obvious, it might be worth re-appraising it. It comes down, of course, to what you are trying to do with your photography. If satisfying an audience that you are familiar with is the aim, then you might be better off finding ways to hone and improve a ‘perfect’ viewpoint rather than be different for different’s sake. But if you do want to separate yourself creatively from others, then understanding the how and why of cliché is just the starting point. Next month I’ll continue this with a look at ways of avoiding cliché. It often, of course, means working that bit harder at finding a different but useful view. So what would you do with an excavation at Stonehenge? More in the next issue…
