We take comfort in familiar things. We prefer continuity to change. We are very disturbed when we are pushed out of our comfort zone and loose our pointers.
Photography, it seems, is the same. Very often, a seemingly increasing trend, we see images of taken at different time and at different places that look the same. Same background, same composition, same overall feeling.
Let’s take bedrooms, for example. There are huge amount of news pictures taken in bedrooms. Usually, the bed is in the background, or underneath the subject, looking messy and unkept. The subject is either sitting on it, or against it, or even standing in front of it. Thousands of pictures of people in bedrooms, from Detroit to Kenya, illustrating everything from the ravages of war, rape, drugs, recession, marital abuse, homeliness, and much, much more.
Obviously one’s bedroom tells a lot about the person who lives in it. This is where we keep our most personal belongings and stay the longest time, albeit often asleep. Thus the added storytelling value it brings to an image or photo essay. But after a while, since it seems it has become an inescapable image, it becomes almost counterproductive because of its over familiar nature.
There are numerous reasons why those shots have become so common. Besides our love of familiarity, we also copy what we love. And because of the huge availability of images on line, it is easy to find, love and copy. But like with every trend, when it becomes excessive, it also becomes repulsive.
Photographers, obviously, love to be published. In order to make that happen, they use a simple metric: what’s been published before. Thus starts a trend that soon becomes overwhelming.
Rest assure, once that happens, those images no longer get published, forcing the photographers to find new popular settings, framings, artifacts ( remember the lens baby fad?) that will let then ride the publication fast lane. We, as spectators, have to navigate through this noise, finding talent in the most unexpected places, away from those trends and into unfamiliar places. A few of these images are here, this week, for your enjoyment.

Paul Melcher