Most travel campaigns hire the best photographer money can buy. Icelandair did the opposite and handed US$50,000 to the worst one it could find, on the theory that Iceland is so photogenic it survives even determined incompetence.
The airline’s open call for a genuinely bad photographer drew a response it clearly did not plan for: 127,642 entries from 178 countries, with judges spending more than 2,000 hours screening what were, by all accounts, terrible photos. The winner, announced in June, was 28-year-old Blanche Mortemard of Paris, France. Her prize was the cash plus 10 days touring the island, shooting its landscapes with no filters, no retouching and no AI.
The trip covered 1,500 miles and produced 5,484 frames. Icelandair then did the thing no marketing department normally does: it published the misses alongside the keepers.
The tally from that haul reads like a catalogue of everything a photography guide tells you to avoid:
- 61 images with an accidental finger or thumb in the frame
- 462 images that came out blurry or shaky
- 282 images containing an object nobody could identify
- 2 images selected for a worldwide billboard campaign
That last line is the whole point of the exercise. Two pictures taken by someone who cannot reliably hold a camera level were good enough to run on billboards, unretouched. As Icelandair put it: “No dramatic skies. No perfect turquoise water. No removing that stray person Blanche didn’t notice.” The airline described the result as “as close to Blanche’s experience as it gets” and “part celebration of something we could all use a little more of: reality as it is.”
Mortemard’s own verdict is more self-aware than most portfolio statements: “Iceland makes it almost impossible to take a bad photo, despite my total inability to straighten the camera or take one without my thumb in shot.”
There is a real technical lesson buried in the gag. Subject and light do the heavy lifting; craft mostly protects you when the scene is ordinary. Basalt fields, geysers and glacier ice are not ordinary, which is why a crooked horizon and a thumb in the corner read as charm rather than failure. It also quietly undercuts the current arms race of sky replacement and generative cleanup, since the campaign’s strongest argument is a set of files nobody touched.
The images have moved off the screen and onto a wall. Iceland by the World’s Worst Photographer is showing at White Rabbit Studios in Shoreditch, London, on September 11 (2 – 8pm) and September 12 (1 – 9pm), 2026. Admission is free but must be booked in advance. Icelandair has said it plans to take the exhibition to further cities in North America and Europe.
Earlier on GismoLand: Icelandair Really Bad Photographer. When bad shots make a great campaign.
