13 Photographers on Their “Photo No-Nos”

What is a “photo no-no”?

Edited by Jason Fulford, Photo No-Nos: Meditations on What Not to Photograph (Aperture, 2021) brings together ideas, stories, and anecdotes from over two hundred photographers and photography professionals. Not a strict guide, but a series of meditations on “bad” pictures, it covers a wide range of topics, from sunsets and roses to issues of colonialism, stereotypes, and social responsibility.

At turns humorous and absurd, heartfelt and searching, this encyclopedic volume offers a timely and thoughtful resource on what photographers consider to be off-limits, and how they have contended with their own self-imposed rules without being paralyzed by them.

Below, read excerpts from thirteen artists featured in Photo No-Nos.

Beautiful Landscapes Seen from Above & from Afar, Guido Guidi

I think most subjects are easily photographable a priori, before observation, and this leads to an annoying proliferation of certain subjects. I would add that the real problem is not the subject, but the way you deal with it. If I had to indicate a subject that I usually avoid, I would say beautiful landscapes seen from above and from afar; perhaps because of the strong myopia that has affected me since childhood. I want to believe that for this very reason, as well as in homage to Eugène Atget, I have become a partisan of the close-up view.

I am wary of categories and subjects constructed from a distance or a priori; they are incompatible with the close-up gaze.

Car Pictures, Mimi Plumb

I didn’t avoid taking car pictures. My archive is full of them. But I didn’t fully realize the prevalence or richness of those images until I scanned my archive on retiring. The car, in my work, epitomizes the desire for the American dream or symbolizes our degradation of the environment. I try never to stop myself from photographing subjects that are interesting to me. Yet this question of what I avoid photographing, regrettably and sadly, reminded me of a time when I implored my students not to make the car picture. It was likely that cliché picture that I wanted them to avoid, the car as a symbol of status and wealth. Boy or girl standing proudly next to their car in the late afternoon light. Their self-portrait and their desire to be part of the American dream. I think now of the pictures lost in their photographic archive due to my shortsightedness, and my bias. Likely, hopefully, they were smart enough not to listen to me.

Color as a Subject, Michael Northrup

In 1980, I was at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago and, like most photo programs at the time, they were opening up to the new color processing kits. I wanted to photograph in color, but after shooting black-and-white for ten formative years, I was way over-self-conscious about it. I started shooting red fire hydrants and yellow curbs. And I was bored to death. A visiting artist recognized this and told me, “Just shoot like you always did in black and white. Don’t think of color.” I think that was the best advice I received in my entire photo-education. Sometimes big problems have simple solutions.

Distant Cultures, Ricardo Cases

Normally, I don’t even feel that I can legitimately speak about my own neighbor—and this difficulty increases the farther I get from my house, my neighborhood, the suburbs surrounding my city, and, more concretely and by extension, Spain’s Mediterranean coast. I am not attracted to the Iguazú Falls or the peculiar and ancestral diet of the inhabitants of Papua New Guinea. My game is local. My work explores familiar situations, and to do them justice, I need the tools that only someone in everyday contact with that cultural environment can possess. This is why I don’t need to get on an airplane to take pictures. On the contrary, it makes more sense for me to go for a walk or get on my bike with my camera.

“To each their own,” as they say. At this point in my life, I know that my emotions are transformed when I recognize things.

Hands, Shane Lavalette

In photographs, hands are always alluring. They can be so beautiful in a way that feels timeless, sculptural, even transcendent, though often, all too easily cliché.

At one point, hands became a subject that I felt I may have overphotographed and therefore, should avoid for a while. But after a few years of practicing this arbitrary avoidance, I allowed myself to again appreciate the endless possibilities of a gesture—and, in doing so, I made one of my favorite images.

Whether we photograph them or not, sometimes it’s the very subjects that we tell ourselves to avoid that are worth returning to in order to try and see them differently and, perhaps, more deeply.

Houses, Stanley Wolukau-Wanambwa

I developed a fascination with looking at American houses when I came to the States for graduate school in 2012. I was dumbstruck by the homogeneity of their design, and read an interesting essay about the propagation of this one ubiquitous style of suburban house in D. W. Meinig’s anthology The Interpretation of Ordinary Landscapes (1979), which intrigued me. But I was also fascinated by the way that they so often pointed to a particular history of American expansion that (to my untutored eyes) evokes wagon trains and the “open” frontier, and that sublimates settler-colonial violence under an aesthetic of humble domesticity. I gradually realized that photographing houses was not only pleasurable, but also served as a means of deferring having to make other kinds of pictures—a means of keeping people at a certain distance—or as a way of avoiding having to knock on people’s doors, so I forbade myself the freedom to make pictures of houses. Bit by bit, the other pictures began to change and improve as a result of the constraint.

Me, Myself, & I, Erica Deeman

Honestly, I never thought I would be the photographer to turn the camera on myself—never, not once. I have found a deep joy in collaboration, making portraits with the people generous enough to give me their time and energy. I’ve spent a lot of time thinking about the camera and the power it holds, and the care that I’ve taken (and continue to take) in making my work. It never crossed my mind to apply that care and time, holding the camera up to myself. Something switched for me in 2019, almost like a snap of the fingers. I had this desire to see who I was becoming since moving to the United States. So I tentatively began making self-portraits, though

I didn’t intend to share them in a pure photographic form. Then COVID-19 happened, and the ability to work together with another human being became difficult and unsafe. Everything felt (and still feels) compounded. Here I was, in my home, and I knew that the one person I needed to collaborate with, commune with, share, and see, was myself.

Open & Empty Fields, Karen Miranda-Rivadeneira

Empty fields fascinate me: big, open fields; misty fields; green fields. Whenever I’m driving, I feel the urge to stop and photograph them. I wonder about all the lives that have walked through them. I visualize multiple times—deep time, cyclical time, human time—converged and suspended. Giving in to my desire, I get out of the car. Then I remind myself that I have done this hundreds of times and that I never end up using any of these photos. I retrace my steps and continue my driving, until the following day, when the urge arises again.

Pigeons, Jeff Mermelstein

Quintessential New York creatures, resilient and filthy. Gray feathers with spats of purple and green. Wings flapping sound like rubber or people’s fat shaking. I can’t stop taking pictures of pigeons, really.

Pigeons feed my drive. Overdone, everywhere, again, the same. Avoidance, repeat, question, stop, no more, take another photograph, why not, I don’t know, really I don’t, and when I don’t really know I do know. Worst scenario, I’ll put it in a box.

I don’t think photographers can stop taking pictures of anything; we just may not show some of them. But then twenty-five years later, we might change our minds.

Recycled Icons, Max Pinckers

Documentary photography has always contended with tension between form and content—the subject (and their agency) versus the visual qualities of the photograph itself. Constricted by the frame, photographs cannot escape the fundamental aesthetic conventions that govern it, and the subjects depicted in it cannot become unstuck from the frame. The danger is when visual tropes are arbitrarily applied to whichever subject in whichever situation, simply because of their effective visual rhetoric.

Documentary photography, and especially its cousin photojournalism, is dominated by these recognizable templates, a form of recycled iconography, casting the world in the same mold over and over again. You know them, perhaps unconsciously or by some kind of deeply engrained affinity: pietà figures, toys or shoes among the rubble, bodies emerging from the smoke, wailing women, faces half submerged in water, eyebrows peaking over the bottom of the frame, black silhouettes against brightly lit landscapes, hands displaying objects of interest, kids jumping in the water, feet dangling in the top of the frame, a bomb’s distant smoke-cloud rising above a city, close-ups of emotionally distressed people, photographs made through car windows or other frames within the frame. When applied, conformist aesthetics overpower the subjects depicted. This is when photographic conventions become self-referential instead of self-reflexive.

These types of images are published over and over again with maximum emotional impact, because readers can more comfortably identify with them than with images of the actual transgressive event.

Roses, Cristina de Middel

I do not want to be seen as a fragile and romantic person/woman in my work, so I just cannot take pictures of roses. And that’s that. The funny thing is that I absolutely love the smell of roses and wear that perfume a lot, but I try not to take any photos of them. Roses are so loaded with meaning; a picture of a rose is never neutral. They symbolize love and romance, passion and luxury, in cliché ways, and have even come to represent cliché itself. Roses also encapsulate most of the stereotypes for femininity from a masculine point of view: the passive-aggressive energy in the visible beauty versus the hidden spines, that idea of beauty that can hurt you, the trap of sensuality, the metaphor of blooming, the scent of a woman. A photo of a rose taken by a woman has a different meaning.

Sunsets, Alex Webb

Ever since I embraced working in intense, vibrant color in the late 1970s, I’ve had a deep ambivalence about photographing sunsets. While their otherworldly glow often seduces the eye, I find that another part of me viscerally resists their clichéd beauty. I remember showing Josef Koudelka an early color photograph of mine from Jamaica of a group of men in trees silhouetted against a brilliant orange sky at a Bob Marley concert. “Too sugar,” he said in his blunt Czech way. And he was right—but it wasn’t just that it was too sweet, it was too easy.

But every once in a while, I discover something that qualifies and complicates the one-note refrain of the setting sun: a mercury vapor lamp casting its greenish hues across baseball spectators in Cuba with a burning red sky behind, or the cold blue tones of a quay in Greece contrasting with the pinkish notes along the horizon. That’s when I leave my anxieties behind, and give myself permission to photograph the complex music of certain sunsets.

Yakuza, Kyoko Hamada

In 1999, while I was going to art school in New York, my father in Japan was diagnosed with terminal cancer. As a result, I’d go back to Japan every three months or so to visit him in the hospital. As a young photographer, I thought a lot about how to approach taking a picture of my fading father. The hospital was near Asakusa, Tokyo, and after these visits, I would roam the streets with my 35 mm camera, usually feeling very sad.

On one of these walks, I happened on a small back road where a group of policemen were hanging out smoking cigarettes. As I walked by, I saw a man lying on the ground in a fetal position. He was passed out with his eyes closed, facing the blue sky, drool dripping out of his mouth. The police weren’t paying him any attention, and a cleaning lady was busy trying to sweep the street around him. It was one of those social-journalism moments. I remember thinking that this was probably not the kind of picture I should take. I knew it wasn’t fair to the man on the street, whose life could be at its lowest point, and who was completely unaware of a girl with a camera observing and contemplating. Against my better judgment, I raised my camera and photographed the cleaning lady and the man on the ground. Then, unable to stop myself, I moved in closer to the fetus shape. His body contrasted with the dark asphalt in the bright daylight, and a water puddle reflected shiny light next to him. He looked like he was floating in a dark universe. As I framed my shot, I fantasized about making a contrasty print in the darkroom to accentuate this. I clicked the shutter and all of the sudden, I heard a deep, heavy voice right next to my ear. It said, “Hey, hey Jo-chan.”

My heart almost stopped. I slowly turned my head and a bald man with a toothpick sticking out of his mouth was staring right into my eyes. He smelled of strong cologne and cigarette smoke, and a colorful flower shirt was sticking out from under his dark pinstriped suit. His eyes were quietly fixated on my face. My brain just repeated the words, Shit, shit, shit. At the same time, I felt that I had to maintain eye contact with him. My heart was pounding, but I was trying not to show it. Then he quietly said, “There’s a photograph to take, and there’s a photograph not to take. Which one do you think this is?” Before I got a chance to respond, he quickly shifted from his threatening yakuza [gangster] character into a silly comedian and said, “Why don’t you take a picture of me? You don’t see too many good-looking gents like me around here!” With that, he struck a pose and waited for me to take a picture. So I did. Click. The yakuza nodded and seemed pleased that my attention had moved from the passed-out man on the street to him.

On the way home that day, I imagined having a drink of cold sake with the yakuza man. I wondered what he would have said about me taking a picture of my dying father in the hospital, plugged into all those tubes and the urinary drainage bag. “There’s a photograph to take, and there’s a photograph not to take. Which one do you think this is?”

This text originally appeared in Photo No-Nos: Meditations on What Not to Photograph (Aperture, 2021).