Iceland is arguably the easiest place on Earth to take a stunning photo. Icelandair set out to prove exactly that — by handing a camera to someone who insists she’s terrible at it.
Meet Blanche Mortemard, the French woman crowned the “world’s worst photographer.” She beat out 127,624 other self-confessed bad shooters to win $50,000 and a 10-day trip to Iceland, earning the judges’ attention with a blurry Statue of Liberty and some decidedly wonky snaps from Norway. Now she’s back, and the results of her Nordic adventure are in.
Over a 1,500-mile journey through the country, Mortemard fired off more than 5,484 photographs. The tally of imperfections is glorious: 61 images with a stray finger or thumb in frame, 462 shaky or blurry shots, and 282 featuring genuinely unidentifiable objects. No filters, no fixing, no rescuing the composition.
That’s precisely the point. Icelandair describes the stunt as “part experiment, part reassurance, and part celebration of something we could all use a little more of: reality as it is.” The thesis is simple — Iceland is so photogenic that even a self-declared disaster behind the lens can’t ruin it.
To back up the claim, the airline picked two of Mortemard’s shots for a worldwide billboard campaign. Working from the original RAW files of Skógafoss waterfall and Vestrahorn peak, Icelandair applied only minimal edits — mainly contrast and color — before blowing them up large.
Crucially, the company played it straight. “We followed the World Press Photo editing rules: photographs can be processed, but the content of the image should remain unchanged, and color, contrast, and other adjustments should not misrepresent what was captured,” Icelandair says. In a nice touch for the pixel-peepers, the airline even published the RAW files so “photography boffins” can inspect them closely.
The honesty extends to what stayed in the frame. As Icelandair puts it: “No dramatic skies. No perfect turquoise water. No removing that stray person Blanche didn’t notice. And certainly, no rescuing her composition.” What you see is what she got.
The campaign is a clever inversion of the usual tourism-board playbook, where landscapes are polished into oblivion. Here the message is the opposite — put down the retouching tools, trust the scenery, and just press the shutter.
Mortemard’s work is heading to a London exhibition, where she’ll also give a talk about her photographic misadventures. The free event takes place in Shoreditch, with tickets available online.
It’s a rare marketing move that manages to flatter both the destination and the amateurs the industry usually intimidates. If nothing else, it’s proof that the best camera really is the one you have — even if there’s a thumb over the lens.
