Picture This Channel 4

Whilst setting my video to record the American football on Tuesday night I noticed a programme on channel 4 at 5 in the morning called "picture this".

After a little research it was a TV programme about four aspiring photographers who are to be put through several tasks with the chance to win a book deal and a display in a gallery.

It sounded good so I set the video and actually managed to watch it today. To me it summed up everything that i hate about photographers and photography. Don't get me wrong the technical abilities and photoshop skills were impressive and the finished images were technically correct.

However the photographers were so self centred they completely failed in their tasks. For example one of the tasks they were set this week was to produce portraits of each other. To me a portrait should be all about the person being photographed and should tell their story. So for example if i was commissioned to create a photograph of a photographer I would shoot them at work or in a dark room etc. Between the 4 people one decided the sitter should be tied up on a park bench bondage style ....... How is that a portrait? The guy wasn't into bondage (that we are aware of). The second decided to make the guy look like her and dressed him in her clothes and watch etc ????? the third had his fellow female photographer scrubbing the streets on all fours ??? The last was the only one that came near a portrait and pictured the sitter on a settee in the street next to a graffiti wall, in fairness I liked the composition of this shot.

However what really hacked me off was when they were tasked with photographing people in a British seaside town. One of the photographers got a couple of children to dance with their parents in the background of the shot. He then photoshopped a sign into the parents hands that said "the children are dancing for crack". Personally i found this disgraceful that he would betray the peoples trust to make them look like crack addicts.

At this stage I turned the video off.

I know these are my personal views but I really do believe it's the photographers job when being tasked to take a portrait to photograph the real person. In my opinion a photographer who imposes what they want and not what the client wants is a failure.

If the task had been to create art my views would have been differant but it wasn't. The brief was to take a PORTRAIT.