Icelandair crowns world’s worst photographer in playful Iceland contest

Icelandair just turned the usual photo contest logic upside down. Instead of chasing the sharpest files and the cleanest compositions, the airline named Blanche Mortemard, a Paris resident, as its “really bad photographer” and paired the win with a roughly 10-day trip in Iceland, travel expenses covered, and $50,000 for photographs, content, and participation.

The contest drew 127,642 applications from 178 countries before closing on May 1, 2026. Icelandair then spent more than 2,000 hours screening applications and conducting interviews, narrowed the field to 13 finalists on May 29, and announced Mortemard as the winner on June 3. Finalists were revealed on Icelandair’s Instagram account, and the airline said Mortemard’s journey would be featured on its social channels through the summer. Professional photographers were explicitly excluded, and the selected traveler had to be able to travel for up to 10 days in June 2026 and be allowed to travel to Iceland, the UK, and the USA.

For hobby photographers, the appeal is not that bad photography suddenly became good photography. It is that the contest spotlights the most common beginner mistakes in plain view. Icelandair said the campaign started because many people think photos of Iceland look “too good to be true,” and the airline framed the brief around “raw, authentic moments” rather than filters or AI trickery. Mortemard’s technically weak and blurry submissions fit that idea perfectly because the point was not polish. It was proof that a strong place can still carry a frame, even when the photographer misses the mark.

That is where the lesson lands for anyone learning the craft. Timing can be off, framing can be loose, the horizon can tilt, and the main subject can get swallowed by the scene. In a landscape as dramatic as Iceland, those errors are easier to forgive, but they are also easier to notice, which makes them useful teaching tools. The contest’s huge response suggests the idea resonated because it stripped away the pressure to perform and replaced it with something more familiar: real travel, real scenery, and the freedom to shoot imperfectly.

Icelandair’s marketing director, Gísli S. Brynjólfsson, said the project resonated because people are tired of manufactured perfection. That is the sharpest read on why a “worst photographer” contest worked at all: in a destination built for spectacle, the bad shot still has a chance to tell the story.