When Icelandair launched a competition to find "a really bad photographer", you might have rolled your eyes. Another viral marketing stunt, another excuse to mock people. But having looked through the winning pictures from Blanche Mortemard's portfolio, I think we can actually learn something.
Don't get me wrong: these photos are, in technical terms, not great. A harbor at night blurs into a smear of gold streaks because of an unsteady hand. A shot of a seagull is photobombed by a human ear. The Statue of Liberty transforms into a ghostly, smeary mess. These aren't artful mistakes; they're the kind of errors most of us spent our first year with a camera trying to avoid.
And yet none of these shots are boring. And that's the uncomfortable bit for anyone who's invested serious money on kit and serious time on technique.
As the national airline put it when launching its tongue-in-check search: "We want to prove that even the worst photographer can take great photos of Iceland." On the face of it, that's merely a good joke about a beautiful country being forgiving of bad photos. But scratch the surface a little, and it's also a direct challenge to the idea that great images require great photographers.
Look past the technical failures by Mortemard – who was chosen from over 127,000 applicants for her sheer lack of ability – and I argue there's something really interesting going on in her pictures.
The condensation-streaked window overlooking the snowy terrace, sunburst blasting through it, captures something a cleaner shot probably wouldn't: the actual experience of looking out from inside a warm building into blinding Nordic light. The motion blur in the harbor shot turns ordinary boat lights into something closer to brushstrokes. Even the photobombed seagull has a kind of deadpan comic timing to it.
Being present
I'm not arguing, of course, that Mortemard secretly a brilliant photographer. But I do think her shots separate clearly two things photographers tend to bundle together: technical competence and the ability to produce a photo people actually want to look at. She's failed at the first while stumbling, repeatedly, into the second.
And that gap poses an interesting question. Namely: how much of what we call "good" photography is technical skill, and how much is simply being present; pointing a lens at something worth seeing, and pressing the button?
As the campaign suggests, Iceland's landscapes were always going to do a lot of the heavy lifting here. Mountains, fjords and harbor towns are forgiving subjects; they look striking even when smeared, soft or backlit, because the shapes and light are already doing the work. In contrast, the same flaws applied to a dull car park would just look like… flaws.
For anyone who's obsessed over getting every camera setting right, it's a useful, humbling reminder that gear and technique are tools in service of something, not the something itself.
A sense of reality
And here's another thing these shots made me think about. In an era of AI-smoothed, algorithmically "perfect" travel imagery, technical incompetence might have accidentally become a way of making a picture feel real. Mortemard's photos can't be mistaken for generated content, precisely because they're so obviously shoddy. AI can do a lot, but it can't do that.
None of this suggests we should abandon craft, especially if we don't have acesss to such majestic scenery. But it doesn't remind me that – as the late Martin Parr and others have shown us – a seagull, a sunburnt beachgoer or a dropped ice cream can make for a more memorable photo than a beautifully composed but ultimately dull panorama. Mortemard didn't mean to make that point, but Iceland, it turns out, agrees with it anyway.
