Perfect Is Boring And Dangerous. Is It The Photographer’s Fault?

25/05/2026

A recent comment by a retoucher on social media stated that it was impossible to get an image right in camera, because it would not be ‘perfect’. The ignorance and arrogance of such a comment is obvious and should perhaps be ignored and placed in a category labelled ‘engagment farming’. Nothing more and nothing less. However, it did make me think, and therefore I responded that ‘perfect’ was boring. The poster immediatly responded and back-tracked saying that they didn’t mean perfect. I replied that it was the exact word they had used. They replied by saying that perhaps ‘visually clean’ was what they meant to say. Again, I said that sounded just as boring and that it is more authentic and beautiful to show the world’s imperfections. They said my viewpoint was interesting. I don’t think they understood what I was saying. At the time of writing my ‘boring’ comment has received 133 likes.

For me the search for ‘perfection’ is not only boring, but dangerous. Yet, I would argue that it has become a dominant factor in all of our lives. Whilst, watching some vintage interviews with female guests on Chris Evan’s TFI Friday recently(remember that people of the 90s? at tea-time on a Friday!). I was struck by the normality in dress, presentation, speech and opinions that guests such as Mariah Carey, Pamela Anderson, Sinaed O’Connor, Bjork, Patsy Kensit and Kylie Minogue amongst others showed. There was no over-the-top styling, heavily applied make-up, preening at the camera, or PR controlled question and answering. Instead, their was an honesty and believability. The interviews were funny, revealing and entertaining. Natural and truthful. I am no fan of Evans, but his interview technique was unpolished, relaxed and equally entertaining. The opposite of the photo-shopped, Instagram, image obsessed world we live in today.

Photography has played a big part in this loss of honesty. At least post-production has. The quick fix to perfection, to fakery and dishonesty. The problem is that the world that post production presents has become an aspiration for some and a reality for others. A perfect world in which it is essential to be part of and excel within.

I have met few photographers who implement such a desire for perfection in their own lives, but many who do in their photography. Why? Do they think that the world and the people they are photographing can only be improved through their intervention? It sounds pretty egotistical if put like that I think, but it can be the only reason. The idea that the photographer through post-production can make an imperfect world perfect and therefore improve their photographs and photography makes no sense either, unless they are unhappy with the world and the people they see. Their idea of perfection also needs to be questioned. Who is defining this idea of perfection? Is it personal, cultural, social, political or all of these?

I said at the beginning of this article that as well as perfection being boring, it is also dangerous. What I mean by this has two interpretations. From the photographer’s perspective creating any form of photography that can be easily imitated by AI is a dangerous route to take. Images that appear too perfect can easily be interpreted as being AI created. This is not a suggestion, it is a reality, which is happening today. I am afraid that I have little sympathy for the photographers who are crying foul when this is happening to them. What did they expect was going to happen to their ‘style’ when anyone can replicate it through a few word prompts?

However, perhaps more importantly there is a danger outside of photography that is being created by photographers and photography. That of unrealistic expectations concerning physical looks, with the resultant mental wellbeing issues. Gen Z is beauty-obsessed. In fact, female and male teen spending on beauty is booming in 2026, a category that continues to defy economic slowdowns, according to the findings of Piper Sandler’s latest Taking Stock With Teens spring survey. According to the investment bank’s biannual report, which surveyed 6,455 teens across 43 states in the US, average annual beauty spend among teens has climbed to $374, representing a 10% year-on-year increase. I mentioned this to my fourteen-year-old daughter and her response was “of course, it’s all about Instagram, Tik Tok and looking good”.

I am sure that no photographer wants to be held responsible for anyone’s negative mental wellbeing or be perceived as a controlling megalomaniac attempting to change how the world looks. However, I think that we have to accept that if you are attempting to provide your concept of perfection through photographic manipulation you might be. How does that feel? Not good? I’m not surprised. Ever considered this? No? Okay, then maybe you should. This is not an order, but it is a suggestion given from a place of caring. Whilst you are considering that, why not also forget about perfection and focus on honesty. The second is achievable, the first does not exist.

Further Reading:
https://unitednationsofphotography.com/2024/04/26/when-post-production-takes-over/
https://unitednationsofphotography.com/2022/05/12/women-dont-look-like-that/

Dr.Grant Scott
After fifteen years art directing photography books and magazines such as Elle and Tatler, Scott began to work as a photographer for a number of advertising and editorial clients in 2000. Alongside his photographic career Scott has art directed numerous advertising campaigns, worked as a creative director at Sotheby’s, art directed foto8 magazine, founded his own photographic gallery, edited Professional Photographer magazine and launched his own title for photographers and filmmakers Hungry Eye. He founded the United Nations of Photography in 2012, and is now a Senior Lecturer and Subject Co-ordinator: Photography at Oxford Brookes University, Oxford, and a BBC Radio contributor. Scott is the author of Professional Photography: The New Global Landscape Explained (Routledge 2014), The Essential Student Guide to Professional Photography (Routledge 2015), New Ways of Seeing: The Democratic Language of Photography (Routledge 2019), What Does Photography Mean To You? (Bluecoat Press 2020) and Inside Vogue House: One building, seven magazines, sixty years of stories, (Orphans Publishing 2024). His photography has been published in At Home With The Makers of Style (Thames & Hudson 2006) and Crash Happy: A Night at The Bangers (Cafe Royal Books 2012). His film Do Not Bend: The Photographic Life of Bill Jay was premiered in 2018.

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4 responses to “Perfect Is Boring And Dangerous. Is It The Photographer’s Fault?”

Peter Dickison

May 29, 2026 at 2:54 am

Thanks for this article, Grant.

Perfect IS boring.

I see this all the time in the fashion industry – the over-retouching, the samey-sameness of blandly perfect imagery that (with some exceptions) makes 90% of fashion imagery indistinguishable and interchangeable. Where one photographer’s work looks almost identical another’s and it becomes hard to tell which brand is which and they have to stamp the brand name on the image.

I believe it’s an industry and – as has been pointed out above – a Social Media (and now AI) problem, not just a photographer-following-the-crowd problem. After all the client wants what the client wants, which these days can be “Oh, XYZ got a ton of views on Instagram, let’s do that!” If the client only hires photographers who shoot bland perfection, then photographers might be forgiven for producing such work to put food on the table.

Kudos to the brands still valuing difference, imperfection, and keeping their imagery off-centre through great art-direction, risk-taking, and employing photographers with distinctive visual languages. I rejoice when I look at an image and know who took it or what brand it is purely from the visual language.

When every image is ‘perfect’, no image is perfect.

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Pete Gardner

May 26, 2026 at 5:25 pm

Reading your piece I was reminded of a couple of things which both highlight your comments and, in some ways, suggest a flip-side that might also be taken into account.

Not so long ago I did a quick pack shot for a client who required it urgently for an Amazon listing – so when I say quick, I mean very quick; plain background, window light, card reflector for fill-in, a quick tweak of the curves and a crop in photoshop and that was it – about as simple and basic a pack shot as you could wish for – the kind of work I cut my teeth on as an assistant 40 years ago – but it was rejected by Amazon as being Ai content. At the time I could do nothing but laugh at the irony.

The other thing I am reminded of is how, over the years since I’ve been shooting digital, I’ve come to deal with my raw capture files; using linear camera profiles and by default having nearly every image processing parameter in Adobe RAW turned off, just so I can view and work on a file that is as close as possible to the image the sensor has recorded via the lens – it’s not that I am a purist, far from it, but I prefer not to have a host of ‘corrections’ made to a file before I even get to assess it on screen and, in many cases, it’s the very optical aberrations and subtle distortions of a lens, which the RAW processor is valiantly trying to ‘correct’, that actually give character to an image and something I prefer to preserve. Frequently I see in the never-ending online debates over analog vs digital, the charge that in comparison to film, digital files are soulless and clinical, and I believe that is due in large part to this often unwitting ‘background’ software processing.

The point about those two stories is that it’s not only photographers who are knowingly making images align to certain ideals of ‘perfection’, but also the camera and smartphone manufacturers, software designers, and media algorithms that conspire to create equipment and environments which promote those criteria of ‘perfection’, often without photographers themselves exercising any active decisions about it.

For sure, camera manufacturers have historically played an important role in ‘chasing perfection’ – in a highly competitive marketplace the best way to sell and keep selling your product is to constantly and incrementally improve your product; more optically ‘perfect’ lenses; more ergonomically ‘perfect’ camera bodies; more ‘perfect’ auto-focus, etc., etc., and photographers who buy into that merry-go-round of having all the latest gear are more likely to be complicit in a more general striving for so called imagery ‘perfection’, if only to validate their considerable investment.

Social media, however, seems to be nurturing a more extreme and systemic embodiment of ‘perfect’ imagery. Gone now are the days of well delineated roles within photography; the family ‘snapshotter’, the keen amateur, the seasoned professional, who could fairly easily be discerned from the imagery they generated – social media and advanced software image processing has blurred those boundaries completely and often the only distinction between professional and amateur is one of remuneration.

Criteria of quality, originality, creativity, craft are all marginalised in a world where views and likes are paramount – it’s the triumph of populism and the lowest common denominator over the genuine and unique. Because social media is driven by content and algorithms, influencers and content makers are mostly chasing trends, constantly seeking to present themselves as fitting into whatever that latest trend might be and that becomes the dominant arbiter of perfection – it’s got over a million likes, it must be pretty much perfect, no? – it’s no wonder that body dysmorphia and negative mental wellbeing become unwelcome symptoms of this voracious world – nobody is really being themselves, they are trying desperately to be like the representations they see trending online, in order to gain likes and traction for their own accounts – and when a smartphone and a $20 set of filters and ‘recipes’ can create a totally fictional representation, the mismatch between the online world and reality can be stark.

For many photographers, producing work that aligns with the trends, that ticks the right boxes to get picked up by the algorithm is, maybe, not entirely a matter of a personal striving for some rather arbritary form of perfection, but also simply to achieve some measure of recognition within a realm that has largely decimated most other forms of sharing work (magazine editorials, etc.), where more measured and nuanced considerations of quality were prevalent.

It’s a bleak picture I admit, and I for one am quite happy sitting in my dark little imperfect corner of cyberspace, where the occasional and probably accidental passerby stops to look and maybe gives a little thumbs-up, but a lot of people want wholesale affirmation of their work and that currently resides in the arena of social media trends, where, on the whole, you have to play by their rules. Perfection is as perfection does.

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1. Peter Dickison
  
  May 28, 2026 at 11:46 pm
  
  Such an insightful reply, Pete. Really got me thinking, and made a good point about achieving recognition when other forms of sharing have disappeared. Could have been an article in itself!
  
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  1. Pete Gardner
    
    May 30, 2026 at 7:23 pm
    
    Thanks Peter – that’s the trouble when you start to think about these things, before you know where you are you’re writing War & Peace! Photography just get’s more complex and to try and make any kind of definitive statement becomes akin to trying to nail a jelly to the wall in a thick fog.
    
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