The Everyman Photo Contest is a privately organised photo competition, which only non-professional photographers can participate in.

So for the sake of argument, let’s just say that I would be interested in entering it. Looking at the categories to enter, we see:

black & white
landscape/nature
people/portrait
travel/architecture
macro/abstract

Say I want to enter with one of my black and white photos, depicting people from Japan. What is the right category?

Does it mean black and white photos all have to go into the first category, and the others all contain colour photos? And even more difficult, what exactly are travel photos? How can you tell that a photo was taken during travelling? A photo from Japan can surely count as a travel photo, but the problem is that I am not travelling, I am living here. Because there is a high chance that there will always be people living at the location depicted by the photograph, how can any photo be a travel photo?

Maybe I am overly sensitive, but isn’t the concept of travel photo a rather arrogant thing? If a photo is not taken in the Western world, than it is an exotic location and can only imply that someone must have travelled somewhere. This reminds me of the term Far East, that I heard many Asians dislike. Far from what?

These notions make us forget that other parts of the world are also places where other people live, and for them your photograph, while temporarily being there with them, is hardly a travel photo. It is a photo of their home. Travel photos degrade that home to a simplistic scenery listed in a travel brochure. So let’s not view or take travel photos, let’s simply enjoy looking at pictures of places where other people live their lives, go about their daily business. Just like we do… here… wherever we are.