A broken plastic bucket lying abandoned on a beach. A staircase that spirals but leads nowhere exciting. Stacked chairs, waiting for a café that’s closed. These aren’t award-winning shots. They’re not dramatic, emotional, or even pretty. But they’re real. And I can’t stop taking boring pictures.
People sometimes ask, “Why take pictures of boring stuff?”
To me, that’s the point. In a world that constantly demands excitement, there’s something quietly radical about noticing what others overlook.
For the record, I took all of these so-called boring pictures on 35mm film—a medium that encourages patience, slowness, and deliberate looking. In a world of instant everything, that pause matters. Film photography slows you down—and that’s no small thing.
Key Points: Why Take Boring Pictures?
- They capture what most people miss
- They challenge ideas of beauty and value
- They’re a form of slow-looking in a fast world
- They document real, unfiltered life
- They turn banality into quiet poetry
- They show presence without performance
The Purpose of Boring Photos
This photo series captures the everyday, nothing epic, dramatic, or aestheticised.
They’re intentionally “boring”: fragments of ordinary life rendered without flair or filter. But by pausing to photograph them, we’re invited to slow down, look again, and rethink what’s worth noticing.
Moreover, these images aren’t about perfection or composition. They’re about presence.
Indeed, photographers such as Stephen Shore and William Eggleston pioneered this demographic approach to boring photography. See Shore’s work on the MoMA website for an example of how the mundane can become meaningful.
Sometimes, a broken bucket on a beach says more about life than a sunset ever could.
What Makes a Picture Boring (and Why That’s OK)
However, “boring” is a subjective term. To some, it’s a blank brick wall. To others, a solitary red chair. These photos also include:
- Car park signage – direction with no destination
- A ceiling lit by strip lighting – harsh, unflattering, institutional
- Footprints on sand – a presence, already disappearing
In essence, they’re not scenes you’d usually frame in your living room. But maybe they’re what life looks like when you’re not trying too hard.
Not beautiful. Not terrible. Just there.
Finding Meaning in Boring Pictures
We often associate photography with capturing decisive moments. But what if the indecisive ones tell us more?
In contrast to high-drama imagery, boring pictures document reality without performance. They resist the spectacle. They show how people live (e.g., a “Full English Breakfast” waiting to be eaten, someone sitting gazing out to sea, a man lost in the glow of a slot machine).
Above all, these pictures remind us that not every story is urgent, and not every scene needs drama.
A Quiet Act of Noticing
When you start noticing the “boring,” you begin to see rhythms. Such as:
- The geometric patterns formed by rows of empty seats
- The copy-paste uniformity of a row of beach huts
It’s like visual fieldwork—observing a world so familiar we’ve stopped seeing it.
And sometimes, the quietness becomes the story.
Final Thought: Ordinary Is Honest
In a visual culture built on filters and spectacle, there’s a strange comfort in looking at things exactly as they are.
No filters. No edits. Just the messy, overlooked, in-between parts of life.
It’s not about nostalgia or irony; it’s just about being present.
And if that sounds boring—good. That’s exactly what I was going for.
Finally, did you enjoy this quiet little tribute to boring pictures? Then, like, share, comment, and check out my other film photography posts.