The Photography Contest, page 1
The photography contest
by Edgar Million
The Photography Contest
Published by Edgar Million at Smashwords
Copyright 2014 Edgar Million
"You live in a beautiful and exciting place", read the introductory text on the advert for a local tourism competition, beneath which a was a photograph of the High Street, last year's winner, framed by a rainbow: "now it's time to show everyone else how great it is here!"
The photograph been drained of all colour, with the exception of the rainbow itself which glared brightly from the shot and made the budding photographer holding the local council leaflet think of bodily expulsions, spraying garishly across the sky.
Corny rubbish , awful photograph, he thought.
Well, he could certainly improve upon last years winner, he mused, and the amateur snapper spent the next month exploring his hometown in search of an image of his local area which expressed the perfect mix of urban decay and poignant, thought-provoking beauty, taking nearly a thousand snaps in the process.
Just to find the one perfect shot.
He sifted and sorted meticulously until, a couple of days before the closing date, he uploaded his best photo, taken with a powerful zoom lens, near the big shopping centre off of Burnett Road.
Five young hoodies were crowding around a sand-paper skinned homeless man, forcibly wrenching a cigarette packet from between his arthritic, bony fingers.
Mugging a nobody for nothing.
He added the image to the ‘Multiculturalism’ section of the competition, since the ensemble of hooded youths included boys represented a wide range of races from the white blond boy at its heart threatening a slight Eastern European rough sleeper, along with various other man-boys of what could have been Indian, East Asian and African or West Indian origin.
It was like the United Nations; an ironic tableau of multicultural co-operation completed by a token female, whose own appearance gave the impression of dual or even triple heritage and who was hungrily urging on the gang in their endeavours.
He called the image, 'Hoodies of the World, Unite and Take Over'.
The image was undeniably edgy, the subject matter a touch controversial, he figured, but the borough was situated on the outskirts of central London, and the whole bloody area could be described as edgy, to put it mildly, and should be described as downright dangerous most days.
Dangerous to the extent that whilst out taking photos he routinely carried, and had once had cause to use, a can of mace which he had disguised as a can of compressed air. All to ensure any opportunistic thief who admired his exorbitantly priced camera kit would find themselves without the opportunity to possess it.
The entries had to be submitted during the month of June 2014, and it had been three weeks in before he settled upon his favourite and transferred it to the group.
The striking image was immediately blocked and removed, and despite his best efforts to re-submit, it was repeatedly kicked off, until eventually he himself was disqualified, with the instruction that they would not accept entries which denigrated the area they were trying to celebrate, particularly one which celebrated criminality, and which had faintly racist undertones, regardless how many times they were resubmitted.
He was outraged.
Admittedly he liked the titles of his works to have punchy, ironic titles, but they were clearly misreading the meaning of his shot.
"Re-instate this instant!" he instructed the soft-minded drone refusing his request, "or face the consequences."
Yeah, right, thought the soft-minded drone in question.
Kerry-Ann, a young temporary worker in the communications department was tasked with vetting the photos.
I let that one through, she thought, and then watch the bosses have a fit and then sack me. She was hoping she'd be given a permanent job there soon, and she didn't plan on jeopardising her chances by letting it into the contest, despite the fact she thought it an excellent shot.
After the argument had gone back and forth for a couple of days though, she decided to run it past her manager, just in case she was being too harsh on the ironic poster.
"Is the guy an idiot?" the comms manager, Tony Jones, asked her. "We've been tasked with making our version of East Baltimore look like Kensington Park, and this idiot is trying to 'keep it real', tell 'im to do one."
He shook his head and instructed her further.
"You're instinct was correct, my dear. The only delinquent youth I'll accept in the competition is Peter Pan," still shaking his head as a new thought bubbled up into his consciousness. "Although, he does carry a blade, and he's a house breaker, I think, so not necessarily the image we want to promote to the violent little sods who live round here either."
She pulled up some more standard images.
"That's better," he said, pointing to another image taken down on Green Lanes, "the boss will love that one, he loves the corny stuff."
Kerry-Ann visualised the man who had last week thrown a chair across the office at a Project Manager for failing to deliver his new plan on time; the strident, terrifying dark haired Chief Exec who constantly berated his staff with insults, and she wondered if it could be true that this beast, Vincent, had a sentimental side.
She turned back to the fancy Apple computer screen and stared at an image of a kitten a sat atop a tatty Olympic Gold coloured Post Box, uploaded only this morning, moments ahead of the 12 O'clock cut off point.
She thought it had been submitted as a bit of a joke, she told him, and then in answer to his blank expression becoming even more vacuous, she explained further.
"It's a kitten, a cute tabby sat atop one of the 2012 post-boxes, " she explained to him, "and the title is 'Show me the kittens' - I think it's a reference to the kitten photos which Flickr shows you if it appears the content may become too ‘adult’ for your tastes."
It was well executed; half the stuff submitted to the comp wasn't even in focus, but it was sentimental rubbish dressed up as irony and best avoided, she thought.
"It's even using selective colour," she told him, before explaining why this was bad, or at the very least, unfashionable or kitsch: "you know, the photo is black and white, except for the subject, which is in colours so bright they could burn out your retinas. It's judged to be a bit - tacky. Especially by photographers."
"You're just a snob, Kel, but I'll mention it to the boss," he told her, knowing he wouldn't, "but I reckon that one is definitely shortlisted. It's pucker. 'ere print me one off and I'll take it up to' 'im. Print off two, in fact - I'll take one home to the missus."
She figured this fashion for kitsch would pass following sombre reflection, but two weeks later she found herself minuting a meeting in a garish chrome-lined boardroom where they chose a re-generated skate park in third place, a sunset over an urban river in second, and the dreadful feline mockery in first, along with ten other photos of the borough as honourable mentions, all making her home-town appear far brighter and cleaner than she ever remembered see it.
An airbrushed dream which you’d have been proud to live in. Disneyland London.
Part of her wished she could have left the hoodie picture in, if only as an honourable mention; it really was an excellent shot, but instead she settled for a small pleasure in the knowledge that at least the whole tacky enterprise had been won by an intentionally awful photograph.
A couple of days later, when tasked with bringing the winner, a short fit man in his early thirties, with cropped balding hair and a faint smell of strawberries, up to Vincent's office she mentioned to him that she'd liked his ironically titled shot.
"It was very clever."
He stopped, his leather soled shoes firing a double gunshot in the echoey corridor, as he turned abruptly to glare at her.
"As the late great Hitch once said," he announced in a voice more pompous than she'd been expecting, " 'irony originates in the glance and the shrug of the loser, the outsider, the despised minority' and I'm far from a loser, you know, I've won the two hundred pound voucher for Nandos. Beat that!"
Mr Jones, she discovered, was massively proud of his work, and she quickly backtracked at her error of judgement in detecting irony where there was none.
"Well," she hedged awkwardly, "either way, it's a lovely photograph. Really brings out the best of the area."
"Really," he said with a grin, pomposity vanishing to reveal perfectly white, straight teeth, "I thought it was awful. A real dog. Or cat rather. I mean, selective colour. Who would? I added it as a joke. Still, I do like Nandos."
“Phew,” she told him.
“It was a hard shot to get though”, he told her, looking serious again “not easy to super-glue a cat to a post box. They don’t like it.”
She smiled at his joke and with a feeling of quiet relief; she had not insulted him after all, and he was swept away to receive his prize from her bosses, whilst she was ordered back downstairs to organise some mouldy boxes of leaflets left in the basement.
Six months later she was promoted from Temporary Administrator to Junior Communications Apprentice and for the five months which followed she threw herself into learning everything she could about this slightly old fashioned branch of the media.
She was no longer bottom of this pile, she reflected, looking across her cramped office at Nigel, the new Junior Administrator who had been tasked with the bulk of her old duties, and she was glad not to have to trawl through that god-awful competition again this year.
&nbs
The bosses had been so taken, they told her, with the job she did last year, they wanted her to carry it out annually.
"Oh please no," she pleaded, not yet having realised that in this office, if you did a thing well even once, then you inherited the task until you left, or died. She implored him, "not me this year, can't Nigel do it?"
"No, we've got him doing a bit of work for me on a presentation, so he's pretty well swamped. We don't want to put too much on him."
She glared at the back of Nigel's head, until he sensed her eyes digging a hole into the back of his skull, and rolled round to surreptitiously wink at her.
The little shit.
When released in the press the competition provoked a flurry of messages complaining about the massive waste of money, and she had to again explain to each how the local business which had put up the vouchers had paid for the privilege.
The entries were the usual rubbish with most decent photos destined for the trash file for being too urban, or not gentrified enough anyway.
Some of the stuff wasn't even good enough to be qualify as trash. There was even a photo of Vincent Goldsmith, the boss, taken nearly a year ago at some local event, and she wondered why-on-earth some sad-sack member of the public had chosen to take this shot, let alone save the poorly composed snap for a year in anticipation of a competition.
She was considering rejecting it out of hand when a thought occurred to her.
Had someone in the bosses personal staff submitted it anonymously to ensure the Chief Exec’s profile remained entwined with the campaign? Possible, she thought and relented; left it alone.
A few days later another shot of him appeared, this time wearing red shorts, Dad dancing, at the annual Festival Park Party, whilst an aged Aswad line up played "Don't Turn Around" on a temporary stage, and she felt certain her hunch about publicity-seeking had been correct.
Numerous other shots materialised as the contest continued, including one of him jogging round the newly refurbished park, which honestly struck her as a little invasive, not flattering, along with various other shots taken at local events.
The user submitting them rolled on unabated for the first two weeks of the contest, until halfway through the third week they uploaded three new pictures of him, at other sites including standing upon the steps of the Civic Centre, in Nandos with last year's winner of the comp, still looking fit, his perfect white teeth on display, and then lingering alone outside another building which she didn't recognise.
Oh this is getting ridiculous, half the stream is him, she thought, it's like being a comms officer for Vladimir Putin.
She called Tony-the-Tosser (her personal, unspoken nickname) over to explain the situation and ask if the Chief’s office could stop being quite so obvious in promoting their boss.
"Print them all off, and I'll have a word," he said, agreeing it was a bit much, and then, as an afterthought, "are there many good ones this time round?"
"Just the usual sentimental rubbish," she told him.
"Lovely, jubbly," he said with a sort of wiggle, and this time it was her turn to look blank. "Y'know, Del Boy, and Rodney, Blimey, what is the world coming to?"
He retrieved the photos from the printer and strode out and up the stairs to see Vincent's PA about the ridiculousness of their ruse. Although he planned to taper his tone. He'd never been on the end of one of his bosses tempers and he was keen to avoid it now.
Kerry-Ann stared at him for a moment as she went, and then dropped her focus returned to the kittens.
There were millions of them this time; clearly the population of East Burnet, witnessing last year's winner, felt they had found an outlet for their feline passions at last, and she began rejecting them in bulk when Vincent burst loudly into the room.
"What the fuck is going on? How dare someone take pictures of my house?" he raged, towering over the quaking office junior, waving the photo of the building she hadn't recognised, and then switching to a quieter voice and gazing in slack jawed horror at her monitor he pointed and asked, "where did that come from?"
Another new one of Vincent had slid into view; this time with him sitting in his car at an unknown location with an unknown woman, clearly in heated conversation and she stared at it wonderingly.
"Take that down now," he ordered her, in a strangely deflated voice. "And all of them. How dare they take pictures of me and my, my family. "
She and Nigel exchanged a glance as she blocked the picture, and Vincent told her that from now on she was to be in this account “day and night”, clearing out any pictures which contravened his right to privacy.
"Day and night?" questioned Kerry-Ann, aghast.
"We'll pay you overtime," he told her, "just write down the hours, and take it all off the website ASAP."
He said this last Ay-Sap.
So she jumped to it, blocking all the offending shots.
She wondered who might be trying to take apart Vincent's life, but realised it could be almost anyone.
He wasn't one for ‘being nice to people on the way up, in case you meet them on the way down’, as he assumed his way down was pre-programmed, with a golden handshake worth half a million and many years earning a fortune as a consultant.
Vincent stood behind her watching the screen, but even as she removed one image, another appeared, this time of him standing down in the freshly dug foundations of a building site, a portly yellow bibbed contractor standing next to him holding an envelope, and his face grew even more ashen, as he ordered her to "get rid, get rid."
They were appearing now almost as fast as she could remove them. The next was somewhere else again, outside a different house, on the steps of a suburban semi, being hugged by a new woman in a skimpy house coat.
A crowd was beginning to gather behind her desk, and Vincent suddenly became aware this office appeared to be on pause, and barked orders to the effect that they needed to go and find some work to do, unless they wanted to find new jobs entirely.
Yeah, right, Kerry-Ann said to herself quietly, like you're going to survive this long enough to sack people, and she made a mental note to get her overtime sheet signed before he got the chop.
Vincent leant in close, so that she could smell Joop aftershave and stale cigarettes.
"Do me a favour love, grab a pool laptop and take this home and do it there. There'll be a few quid in it from my own pocket if you keep a lid on it."
Half an hour later, she was home in her pastel shaded ground floor flat, sat on a mock leather sofa, blocking pictures of Vincent making out with various different women in his car, in varied locations with what appeared to be prostitutes, on the steps of their houses and even through the windows of their apartments.
He appeared on more building sites looking shifty, or round the back of pubs, in grubby alleyways receiving little brown envelopes, which honestly made Kerry-Ann wonder if he was aspiring to be a character from Life on Mars or Filth.
He was an open sore of clichéd depravity, but Kerry-Ann had to admit that she had no idea where he had got the energy from at his age, still being young enough to assume libido would diminish to a faint groan by the age of forty and be a whisper by fifty. Although, when she saw photos with him with a well known drug dealer she reckoned she might well have an idea at the source of his vigour, an idea which was confirmed a week later with an overhead shot in a public toilet, of him leant over the back of the cistern, apparently doing cocaine.
Presumably the photographer was using a hidden camera of some sort. This guy was very thorough, she thought, almost admiringly.
She kept this up for just over a week, pulling down the images as they appeared, before it dawned on her that even though she was blocking them here it didn't mean they weren't still online elsewhere, and she clicked on the photostream to see the rogue biographer’s account in all its hedonistic glory.
The photographs were all there, waiting to be viewed, however the account had received limited views so far, and it appeared their efforts to bury them might just be making a difference, for now, although if the photographer informed a journalist of the photostreams existence, Vincent was so over.
The competition still had three days left to go, and Kerry-Ann suspected that if he managed to ride this storm out, then it wouldn't be run again next year.
