The Absurd Competition of Photo Contests, also a Day at the Fair

I took in the Evergreen State Fair in Snohomish County, Washington, last week. I walked the midway, avoided the games, and ate too many fries and too much cotton candy. There’s always some mixed feelings swimming around in my head about the animal exhibits. I avoided the cows, but took in the sheep. Saw a bunch of horses, and rolled my eyes at the dogs. I followed half a dozen “cat” signs with arrows only to discover that the cats were somehow not there that day.

Each of these stalls and pens had various awards and ribbons attached to them. Some won for showmanship, others won for driving; there were ribbons and plaques, banners and rosettes for a dizzying array of categories and classes.

While the baby goats were adorable (I booped noses with one!), and the Clydesdales were intimidating and majestic, the sprawling mass of other things that were judged was a bit overstimulating.

In the Arts & Crafts hall were ceramics, metalworking, various miniatures, and some diaramas. The quilts took up most of the room of the sewing hall, and they were impressive feats of bed-size, hand-sewn artistry.

This sat next to your very traditional county fair food: pies, cakes, breads, and jams. There were also homemade beverages and some of the best-looking produce I’ve ever seen.

Each of these items won some sort of award. Most had blue “First Place” stickers on them, while others had ribbons for “Best in Class.” Some ribbons made no sense at all to an outsider (Reserve Champion? Sweepstakes?), but it seemed like everyone did really well. Everyone got something. Good job!

And finally, an entire side of the huge exhibition hall was dedicated to photography. While I don’t know much about pigs or rabbits, bell peppers or apple pies, I do know a bit of something about photography.

The age groups for the photographers ranged from the youngest (ages four through nine) to senior citizens. There were also categories for Master Level and Advanced, though those designations were vague and essentially unexplainable.

So how do the judges at the Evergreen State Fair judge things like Aunt Ethel’s blueberry pie? Does the rabbit with the fuzziest tail win? The cow with the best moo? And, most importantly for us, how do they judge a photograph?

I don’t want to get lost in the weeds here, but technically, they use one of several systems that take into account expected standards (called the Danish Method). Sometimes they will judge on a curve (this is the American Method). There’s nothing objective or set in stone here. It’s really just the opinion of the judges. It’s a mood, a vibe.

Most of this is pretty low stakes. It’s bragging rights and maybe $25. There are generally no entry fees for county fairs (except for livestock), so the risk/reward is almost nonexistent. Of course, that does make one wonder why we do it at all. The way these contests are judged is nearly random. It’s a lottery. So why do we insist upon it mattering?

The Photography Exhibition

This wasn’t my first time visiting a county fair photography contest. Here, you’ll find photos of every kind taken by folks who are just happy to have their photo up in public, where it can be seen.

Like with the cows, the cakes, and quilts, these photographs had been judged, and ribbons and stickers adorned them all. You could win best in your category (and there are a lot of categories), best in your age group, best in show, and even sweepstakes (which still made no sense to me).

All of this was confusing since it seemed like nearly every photograph won something, and usually, 1st place. I asked the woman overseeing the photographs, but she just explained it to me just as I explained it to you, which solved nothing for me and will now solve nothing for you. But that’s fine.

Competition is nothing new. Our drive to compete for fun existed before humans, neanderthals, and even great apes playing throwing games (where you toss something and see who can toss it the farthest).

I don’t think there’s anything necessarily wrong with that; whether it’s a foot race or drag racing, I get it. Sure, it can be taken too far, but seeing if your ‘69 Chevy with a 396, Fuelie heads, and a Hurst on the floor can outrun the other guy’s on the quarter mile is just good American fun. Hell, I used to watch the Amish drag racing their buggies. As humans, we just love to race stuff.

And the whole thing is very simple: if you are quicker, you win. There’s really no debate; it’s purely objective. The “judging” makes sense. The same goes for most games. From football to roller derby, the team that scores the most points wins.

At the fair, when I asked about the photography judges and whether they were local professionals, one of the volunteers told me that all the photos were judged “by Rick.” "Is Rick a photographer?” I asked.

“Oh, he does many things, maybe he takes some pictures too,” came the reply. She then told me that Rick wasn’t here now, but he’s “probably in the pig barn, just look for the guy in the overalls.”

I did visit the pig barn, but none of the overall-wearing fellows were Rick, but all of this got me thinking: Just what the hell are we doing?

Incredibly Short History of Photography Contests

Judged competitions at county fairs date back to the early 1800s (and likely well before that in some shape or form). When photography became more accessible to the masses in the late 1800s, many fairs folded them into the competitions like so much Crisco into pie crust.

In 1896, Charles Emsley and Dr. Lombard were the “lucky ones in the photography contest” at the Western Montana Fair in Missoula. A local paper reported that “Mr. Emsley will wear the gold medal till next fair.”

But county fairs never had a monopoly on photography contests. The La Crosse Camera Company out of Wisconsin held a competition in 1895, advertising that they were giving away $1000 in gold to the winners. $200 for first place, $100 for second, $30 for third, and so on. [$1000 in 1895 is about $40,000 in today’s money.] The only catch was that you had to take the picture with one of their cameras (the La Crosse camera was a 4x5 box camera). The ad ran in papers all across the Midwest and East Coast (though a winner seems never to have been announced).

Even newspapers got in on the act. In 1957, the New England Associated Press awarded its “Best in Show” prize to Charles Merrill for his picture entitled “But ‘Twas Too Late,” showing two men removing the body of a drowning victim from the ocean.

Since then, it’s pretty much been the same – low stakes, low rewards (apart from the gold that possibly never existed) and essentially bragging rights.

Juried Shows Are Just Photo Contests

Of course, photo contests aren’t the only photo contests. There are also juried shows, which are a little bit different, though still very much photo contests. Typically, juried shows cost money to enter, and the selection process is more rigorous. In the end, however, the awards are typically small, and it still comes down to bragging rights.

Yet, juried shows are held in much higher esteem than county fairs, which is why they’re called “juried shows” and not “photography contests.” Juried shows didn’t start with photography; they actually come from the art world.

Still, they seem to have been amplified by the art schools of the 1920s, and were not always received positively. In 1929, the Chicago Art Institute held a juried show whose jurors received so much ire and criticism over their curation that they considered obtaining police protection since the public was, according to the Chicago Tribune, “sufficiently upset to fall upon the offending members eye, tooth, and nail.”

While the paper was almost certainly speaking in hyperbolics (after all, this was Chicago during the era of Al Capone), the jurors, as today, were acting as gatekeepers, and the artists were fed up with it.

If you ask galleries that put on juried shows, they extoll such benefits to the artists as networking, credibility, and the ever-important exposure. This is the same kind of exposure that musicians rightly balk at when offered low or no-paying gigs.

And to be clear, a juried show isn’t just a low-paying gig; it’s a gig the artist pays for. Each juried show has entry fees, typically around $25 to $50. That naturally doesn’t secure you a spot; it merely puts you in the running. The competition here isn’t just with the winning, but with the entering.

One of the “best” bits of advice given to artists considering submission to juried shows is to avoid experimental work or work that the juror doesn’t like. Here, you are essentially trying to please a single important person rather than your typical audience (or even yourself). What the jurors want or enjoy is the only thing that matters.

Gatekeeping and Democracy

With the advent of digital photography and social media, photography was heralded as finally being democratized. This was largely true. Apart from algorithms controlling what we see, the barrier to entry, even for film photography, is incredibly low. Like in the early 1900s, anyone could pick up a camera. But now, anyone can get their work seen by dozens and even thousands of people who would otherwise never see it.

This growth allows not only for novices to quickly learn their craft, but also for experimentation and innovation. These are the two things juried shows purposely dissuade, guiding the photographer to submit their “strongest” work, which here means work that will be strong enough to beat out the work of other photographers. Immediately, the vision of a strong photograph roundhouse kicking another dances through my head, and while I’m woefully overanalyzing the language here, the whole thing is a fairly absurd idea.

But keep in mind that everything is subject to the whims and tastes of the juror keeping that gate. The whole process can be stifling in some pretty important ways, urging the artist to be reactive rather than creative.

When photo zines started coming into their own a while back, there was some disagreement over whether this was a good or bad thing. The upside was that now anyone could put out a well-printed book of their photography. The downside was that now anyone could put out a well-printed book of their photography. Gone were the gatekeepers! And those who wished them to be gone rejoiced, while those who relied upon them were disgruntled.

The Search

If you require or insist upon gatekeepers selecting your art for you, it just feels kind of lazy, sort of boring. Finding art and photography that you want to see can be an intensive search. Social media certainly helps, but it requires hours and days, even years of combing through photographs that don’t quite hold your interest.

When I walked through the photography exhibit at the fair, most of the photos weren’t my thing. But there were some that caught my eye, made me smile, and spoke to me. I must have looked at a few hundred photos, finding only a handful that moved me, but it was worth it.

Over the many years that I’ve been on social media, I’ve scrolled by thousands upon thousands of photos that, while technically fine, did nothing for me. It is almost work searching for those that do. But it’s good, honest work. And when you stumble onto something you love, onto a photographer whose work fits so perfectly into your life, how can that not be worth all the effort?

If not for this democratisation, most of those “technically fine” pieces would still be around. It’s good work and appeals to a broad swath of the population (there’s nothing at all wrong with that). But opening up the field, lowering that barrier of entry, also allows innovation and experimentation. It allows for personality, for diversity, for differences to come through. A juried show (or really, any place that gatekeeps) is typically devoid of that on purpose.

As an aside, the Limelight Gallery in New York City was the first full-time photography gallery, opening in 1954. Helen Gee, the owner and curator, took 25% from any of the pieces sold. She held solo and group shows, though she didn’t dabble in the juried idea.

The job of galleries has always been to sell the work they show; it’s how they stay in business. Galleries also held juried shows, collecting money from the hopeful artists through submission fees.

The Absurdity of (Some) Competition

Just like how living in a capitalistic society makes it nearly impossible not to participate in a capitalistic society, it is nearly impossible to escape competition in art. In our normal lives, everything from news to movies to impending fascism competes for a large chunk of our brains, often stifling our creative drive. Making time to look at photos is seen as a luxury rather than essential to our growth as artists and humans.

And once we make that time, every photo we see is, in a way, competing with every other photo we see, whether we choose to view them that way or not. Of course, this isn’t real competition in the strictest sense, but it’s a very close cousin.

Competition is interwoven into every aspect of our culture and society. In researching this piece, I came across a fortuitous article in a 2013 issue of Psychology Today. “Has America Become Too Competitive?” asked the headline.

The author, Dr. Jim Taylor of the University of San Francisco, praised our competitive spirit. It gave us the space race, Nobel prizes, and clearly, we’re the best country on earth, right?

But he lamented that it might be getting a bit out of hand. In 2013, he warned that reality TV shows like Dancing with the Stars and American Idol were mainstreaming the idea that things we do for fun or for art should instead be a competition. He also lumped cooking in with that, asking, “Could there be any other activity more ill-suited for competition than cooking, which relies on the supremely idiosyncratic senses of taste and smell?”

In answer, he suggested poetry was probably a worse idea for competition. And yet, there are poetry competitions. Maybe they’re not on ESPN, but they somehow exist. He uses this to ask, “Why has America embraced competitiveness to the point of absurdity?”

And this was in 2013. Closing off the article, he wondered if this move towards absurd competitiveness might “coincide with a change in America’s values and priorities.” Now, in 2025, we can see that it has.

Political discourse has become our lives. The news cycle is constant. We are expected to understand and have fully formed opinions on everything immediately. And it truly is everything.

On top of that, our media crafts stories for us rather than reporting the facts. Lately, almost all of our media is capitulating to authoritarianism.

Our reaction as people, voters, artists, and citizens isn’t to sort it out and to have some kind of discourse to make our society better for everyone. Our only objective is to win. It’s not even about being right – we are living in a largely post-factual atmosphere now – it is simply and only about winning.

With winning comes power, but only for the already-powerful. For us, the regular folks just trying to survive, the win is merely for the sake of winning. Our love of absurd competition, especially reality TV, directly led to this.

‘Go Out and Beat Yesterday!’

I’m not saying that photography contests and juried shows lead to fascism. But I am saying that we are already weighed down by competition, so why add to it? Why do this to ourselves?

Each morning after I wake up, my watch gives me a little affirmation. I don’t need it to do this. I would rather it didn’t, but I apparently cannot stop it. Sometimes it’ll say “Busy today? You got this!” or “Listen to your body.” The affirmation that irks me to no end is “Go out and beat yesterday!”

What the hell does that even mean? How can you beat a day? I think it’s implying that yesterday I didn’t exercise enough or get in enough steps. It’s calling me lazy and telling me to beat the arbitrary goals it set for me for some reason (and yes, I realize that I’m actually doing this to myself).

But the idea remains: we aren’t just in competition with everyone else, we are also in competition with ourselves. We are constantly urged to strive for excellence, for perfection, to “beat yesterday.” Yet, how often are we urged to be happier, to find more contentment, to appreciate what we’ve got? Basically never.

And that comes back to capitalism and exponential growth. I will only be able to “beat yesterday” for so long. It’s an impossible ongoing goal. It’s unsustainable in ways that my poor, tired legs can hardly stand.

But it’s not that much different from telling ourselves that we need to keep making “stronger” photographs. This kind of competition is hardly different at all from American Idol, a football game, or even the Evergreen State Fair.

Again, I’m not saying that competition is a bad thing. It can be as useful as most anything else. But does it have to envelop us completely? Does it have to be part of our artistic expressions?

Photography and art in general should be democratic. It should be of and by, and for the people, the artistic community, for us. We don’t need gatekeepers to make this work. We don’t need masters; we shouldn’t even want them.

We will always have influences – we’d hardly have art without muses – but our relationship to them should always be held in suspicion, if not contempt. Are we merely echoing them? Are we tailoring our work to fit their idea of art rather than our own? Are we tamping out our drive to explore and experiment because we believe that a juror won’t pick our most original work? In this way, we are in competition against someone who isn’t even competing.

Winning at Art

Winning at art seems honestly moronic. Winning a race or a game makes sense; it’s objective. But winning the Best Photograph Award is absurd. What does that even mean? It’s dishonest and dispiriting. It’s anti-art.

If we absolutely have to infuse the idea of winning at art into our lives, why couldn’t “winning” mean the most innovative, the most different? Even that seems ridiculous, of course, but it would at least reward pushing boundaries, thinking beyond the norms – something art should be doing anyway.

Do we really want to carry forward the ideals of a county fair? Don’t get me wrong, I love going to the fair. I even love seeing the quilts and the pies and horses, and especially the photography. It’s just that when it comes to art, I don’t see how competition helps; I don’t see how it’s healthy.

Whether it’s at the county fair or a juried show in a highly gentrified neighborhood, it’s a good thing that art is being seen by the public. There’s, of course, nothing at all wrong or even suspect with that. And maybe that alone is reason enough to enter contests (it is an incredibly good reason).

But the fact that many wouldn’t enter without the possibility of winning something is kind of a bummer. It’s not the money, of course (though that $100 in gold does sound pretty nice), the winnings are usually next to nothing. The awards process is essentially a lottery. In the end, I suppose it’s for bragging rights. It’s so you can note that you are an “award-winning photographer” on your CV or social media bio. It’s the next best thing to a lie.

I’ll be honest, I’m very torn on this. With all of the incredibly horrible things happening in the world – from genocide in Gaza to the slipping of our own democracy – my little complaints about photography contests shouldn’t really matter at all.

But with all the horrible things happening in the world, the very least we can do is not let it work against our art. Our work and our community should not simply be a subculture existing under the surface, but a counterculture actively fighting against everything that led us to this point. And that, I’m afraid, includes fighting against absurd competition, where the meaning is meaningless and the only thing that really matters is winning.

Conclusion

The Evergreen State Fair had pretty much anything you’d ever want in a county fair: adorable animals, demolition derby, janky roller coasters, and greasy fair food. It also had photography. That in itself seems like some sort of victory. Here’s a collection of a couple hundred people who saw something they wanted to capture and share with the rest of us. That’s the important thing here. That connection is essential.

The competition, the puzzling array of categories, as well as juried shows, all contribute to and distract from that. Rather than solely appreciating the art and the community, we focus upon winning – somehow the opposite of beauty and art, the antithesis of community.

I’m not putting out some call to action, urging you to boycott photography contests. That’s honestly just dumb. Hell, I might even enter a couple of my photos in next year’s fair. Why not? But I think we could create a better photography community, even a counterculture, by keeping all of this in mind. Our lives and our own art could be greatly improved by focusing less on racing our photos against each other, less on winning at art, less on bragging rights, and more on finding the art that inspires us, and in turn, how our own art can inspire others.